Jeannette Walls’s honest and straightforward narration of her memoir unfolds like a fictional cliffhanger. Her childhood stories are humorous and awe inspiring, while her tone becomes appropriately sober and sometimes angry when she recounts her teenage experience. Her alcoholic father’s inability to keep a job and her artist mother’s aversion to work mired the family with four children into extreme poverty, yet they were taught positive values and given a literary and scientific education. But listening to the final chapters is tedious, perhaps because Walls tells less about herself (a casual mention of her two husbands) and repeats much of what we already know about her homeless but intellectual parents. Still, this audiobook about child survival and success offers gems of insight. K.P. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Gossip columnist Jeanette Walls dishes the dirt on her own troubled youth in this remarkable story of survival against overwhelming odds. The child of charismatic vagabonds who left their offspring to raise themselves, Walls spent decades hiding an excruciating childhood filled with poverty and shocking neglect. But this is no pity party. What shines through on every page of this beautifully written family memoir is Walls's love for her deeply flawed parents and her recollection of occasionally wonderful times.

The Glass Castle falls short of being art, but it's a very good memoir. At one point, describing her early literary tastes, Walls mentions that ''my favorite books all involved people dealing with hardships.'' And she has succeeded in doing what most writers set out to do -- to write the kind of book they themselves most want to read.
— The New York Times

Freelance writer Walls doesn't pull her punches. She opens her memoir by describing looking out the window of her taxi, wondering if she's "overdressed for the evening" and spotting her mother on the sidewalk, "rooting through a Dumpster." Walls's parents-just two of the unforgettable characters in this excellent, unusual book-were a matched pair of eccentrics, and raising four children didn't conventionalize either of them. Her father was a self-taught man, a would-be inventor who could stay longer at a poker table than at most jobs and had "a little bit of a drinking situation," as her mother put it. With a fantastic storytelling knack, Walls describes her artist mom's great gift for rationalizing. Apartment walls so thin they heard all their neighbors? What a bonus-they'd "pick up a little Spanish without even studying." Why feed their pets? They'd be helping them "by not allowing them to become dependent." While Walls's father's version of Christmas presents-walking each child into the Arizona desert at night and letting each one claim a star-was delightful, he wasn't so dear when he stole the kids' hard-earned savings to go on a bender. The Walls children learned to support themselves, eating out of trashcans at school or painting their skin so the holes in their pants didn't show. Buck-toothed Jeannette even tried making her own braces when she heard what orthodontia cost. One by one, each child escaped to New York City. Still, it wasn't long before their parents appeared on their doorsteps. "Why not?" Mom said. "Being homeless is an adventure." Agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Not a blissful childhood: MSNBC.com contributor Walls's alcoholic dad stole the grocery money, and her mother would rather paint than parent. Scribner's big book for March. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

An account of growing up nomadic, starry-eyed, and dirt poor in the '60s and '70s, by gossip journalist Walls (Dish, 2000). From her first memory, of catching fire while boiling hotdogs by herself in the trailer park her family was passing through, to her last glimpse of her mother, picking through a New York City Dumpster, Walls's detached, direct, and unflinching account of her rags-to-riches life proves a troubling ride. Her parents, Rex Walls, from the poor mining town of Welch, West Virginia, and Rose Mary, a well-educated artist from Phoenix, love a good adventure and usually don't take into account the care of the children who keep arriving-Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen-leaving them largely to fend for themselves. For entrepreneur and drinker Rex, "Doing the skedaddle" means getting out of town fast, pursued by creditors. Rex is a dreamer, and someday his gold-digging tool (the Prospector), or, better, his ingenious ideas for energy-efficiency, will fund the building of his desert dream house, the Glass Castle. But moving from Las Vegas to San Francisco to Nevada and back to rock-bottom Welch provides a precarious existence for the kids-on-and-off schooling, living with exposed wiring and no heat or plumbing, having little or nothing to eat. Protesting their paranoia toward authority and their insistence on "true values" for their children ("What doesn't kill you will make you stronger," chirps Mom), these parents have some dubious nurturing practices, such as teaching the children to con and shoplift. The deprivations do sharpen the wits of the children-leading to the family's collective escape to New York City, where they all make good, even the parents, who are content tolive homeless. The author's tell-it-like-it-was memoir is moving because it's unsentimental; she neither demonizes nor idealizes her parents, and there remains an admirable libertarian quality about them, though it justifiably elicits the children's exasperation and disgust. Walls's journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect. A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh/William Morris Agency

"Readers will marvel at the intelligence and resilience of the Walls kids."

"The Glass Castle is the kind of story that keeps you awake long after the rest of the house has fallen asleep."

"Some people are born storytellers. Some lives are worth telling. The best memoirs happen when these two conditions converge. In The Glass Castle, they have."

"Charles Dickens's scenes of poverty and hardship are no more audacious and no more provocative than those in the pages of this stunning memoir."

"On the eighth day, when God was handing out whining privileges, he came upon Jeannette Walls and said, 'For you, an unlimited lifetime supply.' Apparently, Walls declined His kind offer."

"Each memory is more incredible than the last... That Walls recounts them so well and in such detail is our good fortune."

"Extraordinary."

"The Glass Castle is nothing short of spectacular."

"Walls has joined the company of writers such as Mary Karr and Frank McCourt who have been able to transform their sad memories into fine art."

Jeannette Walls’s honest and straightforward narration of her memoir unfolds like a fictional cliffhanger. Her childhood stories are humorous and awe inspiring, while her tone becomes appropriately sober and sometimes angry when she recounts her teenage experience. Her alcoholic father’s inability to keep a job and her artist mother’s aversion to work mired the family with four children into extreme poverty, yet they were taught positive values and given a literary and scientific education. But listening to the final chapters is tedious, perhaps because Walls tells less about herself (a casual mention of her two husbands) and repeats much of what we already know about her homeless but intellectual parents. Still, this audiobook about child survival and success offers gems of insight. K.P. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine