The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle
Jeanette Walls

Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat" and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls's childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls' removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents' knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them--despite their overwhelming self-absorption--resonates from cover to cover.

Sarah's Key

When I picked this book I really didn’t know what I was doing to be honest. Jen told me it was my turn and I was still 40 pages into The Help, and thinking no one is going to want to read the Nicholas Sparks book that just came out… I could just see Abby’s literary prowess laughing at me. So I actually googled top book club reads and that is how we all ended up here. I read this book on the subway to and from work and it only took 3 weeks, I couldn’t believe how fast it went for only devoting about 30 min a day. I think I was so intrigued by Sarah’s story and what happened to her that I just wanted to read faster.
I loved Sarah, like Abby said you’re a wench if you don’t. Julia left me bored at times but at others my heart completely went out to her. To be faced with the choice of giving up your baby or losing your husband and everything she dealt with in that particular situation made me feel sick, that she was having someone else control her life and her body. I loved Zoe, she is so outspoken and has such a strong character. And Eduard, when he stood up for Julia in front of his family it spoke volumes about him.
One message I really felt was present here was that you have to be able to live everyday for what you have right now and not be afraid that everything you know can change in a second. When Julia began researching her story she never expected it would turn out the way it did, that what she uncovered would so deeply and profoundly impact her life, that her personal trials would try and get the best of her. When Sarah’s mother opened that door for the French police everything in her life changed. We need to be so grateful for the life and blessings we are holding onto at this very moment.
To kind of respond to Jen’s question a little about how the French government could let this happen… I have read a lot about WWII and during the German occupation of the allied countries the government wasn’t the same as it was in peace time. In France the Vichy is what they called the French who sided with the Nazis. And those were the types of people in charge of the country. It’s hard to judge the French police and say they were bad people, I’m sure a lot of them were just following orders, simply doing what they were told to try to stay alive. At that time everything was rationed you didn’t have a lot of opportunities to do what you wanted whenever you pleased, so having a job that supported your family may have been a larger priority than what they were told to do.
I have spoken with my grandmother a lot about this because she lived in Germany during the war. Her family hated the Nazis and everything they stood for- but my Great-grandfather was a German Soldier. If you didn’t do what they wanted really bad things happened to you and your family. And as for concentration camps they didn’t even know they existed. My grandmother said they knew that Jews weren’t liked, and they had to wear stars on their clothing. She told me a story of one woman in her town who she remembers left and never came back and she always wondered what happened to her- but they had no idea people were being sent away to camps and killed. And people who did know about camps thought they were just work camps where they sent Jews to build things for the war.

My Thoughts on Sarah's Key

I thought that this was a really interesting story. I am always a little bit fascinated by stories about the holocaust because it was too horrible. In my wildest, worst nightmare, I would never be able to imagine the horrors that happened at that time. This book was interesting to me because I had never heard of the Vel' d'Hiv roundup before reading it. Just like Julia, I was the uneducated American.

This book brought up a lot of issues that most people skip over. It is easy to see how horrible it was for all of the families that were rounded up, but that time in world history affected everyone (obviously some more than others). I thought it was an interesting perspective to think of how Edouard was haunted by his involvement in the roundup. Even though it wasn't his choice to move into the apartment and he didn't know about the boy, he still felt at fault for the situation.

I also thought that it was spot on that the general consensus was to forget the horrible things that have happened in the past. We are all guilty of that. Our society is so self involved that we do not pay attention to anything that doesn't directly affect our day to day lives. We are constantly gaining new technology that only furthers our emotional and social hermitism, and furthers our distance from anything that came before this second in time. Our growth is so stunted by technology. It provides great miracles, but it also hinders us in other aspects. I will get off my soapbox now, because I could probably write pages and pages just on that subject alone....back to the book.

I have to admit that I was expecting a lot out of this book because the story line had so much potential, and in the end I was a little bit disappointed. For me, the characters fell a little bit flat. I really liked Sarah...obviously. Anyone who chooses not to like her is probably a heartless wench. She showed such a strong example of resilience. I would not be able to do what she did. I would have withered and died. As for the rest of the characters, at least the rest of the adult characters, I thought they seemed selfish and uninteresting. I was disappointed that I never felt any connection to them. They were just too average to be interesting. That is probably unfair, but that is all I could think when I finished the book. I got the feeling that I was supposed to think that Julia was a heroine, but I never really felt that way. It feels so harsh to write it. So I guess I won't say much more, because I don't know that the characters I create are any better. Plus, I can't think of an adequate way that would really express what I think about them.

I am really looking forward to the next book....have we decided what it is going to be?