The Glass Castle--A Shattering Look at Jeannette Walls' Life

Imagine opening up your lunch at school to find lard slapped between two pieces of bread. Imagine your brother sleeping under an inflatable raft in a house that constantly leaked when it rained. Imagine four children, the youngest just a few months old, huddled in a U-Haul truck in pitch-black darkness, on yet another journey of moving from place to place.

Jeannette Walls writes with incredible richness and stunning detail as she describes her childhood in an haunting memoir: The Glass Castle.

Jeannette Walls is a celebrity gossip reporter on MSNBC and writes "The Scoop" on MSNBC.com. Jeannette has interviewed countless stars and famous people and has walked the Red Carpet. It took her nearly 20 years to pen this memoir and from the very first page, the reader begins to understand why.

In a taxi, on the way to a party, Jeannette finds her Mom digging through a dumpster. We learn that her parents were homeless for years, living on the streets and eventually becoming squatters in a New York building, refusing any "handouts" that Jeannette or her siblings offered them.

Jeannette then weaves her childhood story, and it begins with her earliest memory of cooking hot dogs on the stove when she was three. Alone in the kitchen, her clothes catch fire. She is taken to a hospital and upon discharge, her mother encourages her to return to the stove and overcome any fear she might have of fire. This first incident is just the beginning of many unusual views that her parents bestowed upon the family. The incident with the stove fire left Jeannette with scars that remained with her the rest of her life, scars that were both physical and emotional.

The reader learns of her alcoholic father and her artistic, rather self-centered mother. One can conclude that the family is seriously dysfunctional because they continually were on the run and left adequate housing for sub-standard locations of shelter. Often, there was little money, no food for days and grubbiness was so much a part of them that showers or baths were luxuries.

Despite the horrors of her life, Jeannette shares that her parents took care to make sure they were educated and knowledgeable about the world and her mother occasionally took them to mass. However, Jeannette leaves it up to the reader to conclude any judgment about the issue of homelessness, child neglect, and her parents questionable practices of parenting.

Jeannette writes with an incredibly objective view and she rarely shares her feelings-- the book reads almost as if she was watching someone else's life unfold. Perhaps that is the way it needed to be written, for it provides the reader with issues to ponder and feelings to consider.

If you buy one book this holiday season, let this be the one.