...Review of “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls is an intriguing story of Walls’ family and their experiences. Through Jeannette’s story as both the narrator and the protagonist in the story, the actual state of Walls’ family is vividly described. Through the eyes of Jeannette, the reader finally shares the troubles of Walls family, where the parents are less concerned about the children. Jeanette herself is rendering the burden and responsibility of taking care of her siblings on her shoulders. In conjunction with the other Walls (Jeannette’s siblings), the theme of the story is relinquished while at the same time developing the character of Jeannette. This context will embark on describing the Walls from a family’s point of view while at the same time highlighting their attachment styles. Right from the beginning of the story, the immediate surroundings of the Walls Family is disgusting. It clearly portrays negligence which is symbolic throughout the story as portrayed by Rex and Rose Mary Walls. Though Rex is a loving and caring father, he is irresponsible. Despite his academic qualifications, he cannot keep any job when his family needs it most. Under his alcoholic cover, Rex becomes a completely different person (Walls, 2006, p. 25). Throughout the story, Rex lives a dignified life in dreams and illusions. This is the only way he escapes his responsibilities and problems as the head, the provider, and the protector of the...
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...this story to begin with. A memoir is the most personal form of written word, which puts a greater demand on the writer to produce the best quality work they are capable of. There is a certain defensive aspect that comes along with memoir writing. No matter how happy or horrific the story is, it is the author’s natural instinct to defend it. Similarly in everyday life, there are things that people are naturally inclined to defend such as family, friends, or the way in which someone chooses to live their life. Maybe their choices or actions aren’t exactly admirable or necessarily considered “right”, but nevertheless they defend them if anyone were to ever challenge them about their legitimacy. In Jeannette Walls captivating memoir, The Glass Castle, the reader becomes enthralled with Jeannette’s constant battle between defending her family and the greatness she hopes the Walls will amount to, and settling for the fact that her family is based off of false hope and senseless lies with her incredible story telling techniques. The time the Walls spent living in Welch, Virginia serves as a major transition period for everyone in the family. While Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen were all growing up and trying to discover their identity, Rex and Rose Mary Walls were still struggling to discover the identities they always longed for but never could make a reality. Before the Walls move to Virginia, it was clear that just picking up and moving wasn’t as easy as it always...
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...Regarding the Walls Family Children Every child deserves a warm and caring family. These days, many children are left in abused and neglected families that affect their life afterwards. I believe it is the duty of Child Protective Services to give children the best environment in which to succeed and grow, to evaluate the situation and develop plan for the family while their parents demonstrate that they love their children, their shortcomings as parents outweigh their good intentions. In Jeannette Wall’s memoir The Glass Castle, she talks about her childhood and life, her parents Rex and Mary Walls, her two sisters, Lori and Maureen, and her brother Brian. According to her memoir, Walls family is very different from others families. They are free spirited; moving from town to town, experiencing exciting adventures, using different approaches of teaching their kids, while looking for help from others despite their rough life. The Walls family presents a difficult challenge to me, as the family dynamic is such that a case can be made both for and against the removal of the children from the parents' custody, but Rex and Rose Mary Walls have subjected their children to a host of questionable situations as they have moved about the country in a transitory lifestyle that I cannot consider permissible for the development of healthy children. As an agent of CPS I cannot in good conscience recommend that Lori, Jeanette, Brian, and Maureen Walls remain in the custody of their parents...
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...Children do not always need loving and supportive parents in order to grow up successful. In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, not every child needs loving and supportive parents. Although they do love their children, Rex and Mary use very basic parental decisions; the children are very independent and raise themselves for the most part. With the right mindset, motivation and knowledge this can lead to success in life even through the hardest of times. Jeannette was at the lower class growing up, but she learned to survive anyway she could at a very young age. Considering Jeannette’s parents were not very stable, Jeannette saw that even though she was at the lower side of things, there is always a chance for greatness. A good example of this is when Jeannette tries to explain her survival technique: “We kids usually kept are hunger to ourselves, but we were always thinking of food and how to get our hands on it. During recess at school, I’d slip back into the classroom and find something in some other kid’s lunch bag that wouldn’t be missed-a package of crackers, an apple-and I’d gulp it down so quickly I could barely be able to taste it.”(68) This is the knowledge Jeannette will have all her life, even though it’s unpleasant, she has this mind set and knowledge to use when she is older, which will come in handy. Mary and Rex seem to have unconventional reactions to their children when they needed help and it’s clear that their children take after them even though it’s...
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...Mercedes Morelli Kristen Brady AP Lang November 5, 2012 Traditional Parents vs. Rex and Rose Mary Walls Rex and Rose Mary Walls were not the average parents to four children, but were self centered children themselves; leaving their children to suffer with harsh living conditions. They would constantly be putting their children in situations where their well being was at risk. There was a time when Rex took his daughter, Jeannette, to, “The Hot Pot [which] was a natural sulfur spring in the desert north of town, surrounded by craggy rocks and quicksand.” (Walls 66) “Dad kept telling me that he loved me, that he never would have let me drown, but you can’t cling to the side your whole life, that one lesson every parent needs to teach a child is ‘If you don’t want to sink, you better figure out how to swim.” (Walls 66) This quote is saying that people cannot be afraid to take risks in life. Even though they might, figuratively speaking, drown; people have to be able to have the courage and the strength to pick themselves back up and go after their problems head on. Rex is also teaching his daughter to not be dependent on other people but, to stand on her own and accomplish tasks by herself. The Walls’s parents were not traditional parents their lifestyles, beliefs, morals, and values were not the same as average parents today, which caused for the Walls’s children to also be affected. Traditional parents take care of the basic needs of their child by providing them with...
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...There has always been much controversy regarding the relationship between parents and children through the ages. While some consider that parents are responsible for their children’s material upbringing and that they need to provide their offspring with the basic needs, others believe that parents primarily need to focus on the intellectual upbringing of their children. Jeannette Walls’ situation is self-explanatory when considering parents who would rather instill creative thinking in their children instead of trying to provide them with basic needs. Most people are inclined to associate parents with teachers and children with pupils; yet, not uncommonly children also take on the role of teachers. Through adopting such attitudes they can construct the limits and responsibilities for their parents. As Jeannette’s parents, Rex and Rose Mary, attempted to provide their children with a different way of parenting, it was difficult for Jeannette and her siblings to understand what their role was in the family. Although this is not necessarily the best way to raise a child, society promotes the belief that parents need to raise children in ways that are not consistent with how they actually want to behave. One of the most important roles of children and parents alike is related to how each group needs to accept the other, and Rose Mary displays this when trying to convince Jeannette to stop hiding the reality of their family, stating, “Your father and I are who we are”...
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...There are many themes throughout The Glass Castle, but one theme that sticks out the most is forgiveness. The act of forgiving someone is sometimes hard for certain people, also depending on the situation. Some people forgive others and some just forget the person and move on with their life. In The Glass Castle there is a family consisting of a mother and a father and children. The kids were raised poorly because of the way their parents lived their life. Despite these kids childhoods they still loved their parents anyway. Forgiveness is shown threw Jeanette’s relationship with her parents, mainly her father, and then the other kid’s relationship with their parents, also The Last Song is a story with the same theme. Jeanette’s father is Rex Walls. Rex has always had a probably with drinking. Growing up Jeanette had always seen her father get drunk and not be able to control himself. She knew that he had a problem very early on in her life. No matter the situation, Jeanette would always stand up for her father and defended him. Rex would let Jeanette down over and over again. It got to a point where Jeanette knew she could fend for both herself and her father, so she chose herself. Even though all the troubles Jeanette went through growing up with Rex as her...
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...Everybody has read at least one book that has impacted them one way or another and certainly The Glass Castle was not an exception. From the beginning The Glass Castle captures everyone and every sentence we read makes everyone want to read another one.The main character along her whole family all go through very tough and challenging physical, social, and inner obstacles that they must overcome to survive. This is a book that can impact a persons because everyone can connect to the main character one way or another. “I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster.” The way the beginning of the book is set up is a very intelligent way that leaves...
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...I think the quote “Life’s too short to worry about what people think… they should accept us for who we are.” (Page -157) is important to the book and it can be used to teach people a life lesson. It is important to the book because Jeanette has been through so much as she grows. She’s been judged her whole life. In the book “The Glass Castle”, Jeannette said that she and her family would move place to place and never stayed for long so they never had the time to make friends but she would make enemies. Every place they would live, something bad would happen to her, boys or men would try to take advantage of her or girls would want to beat her up because they would be jealous of her since she was really smart. Jeannette would always get bullied either by kids her age or older people like her teacher....
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...In this case, though, trying to help your kid will actually worsen their lives in the long run. Parents who are put in miserable situations and who try and aim for their child's success will fail. This is shown through the two true stories of Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, and Albert DeMeo, author of For The Sins Of My Father, and how their parents raised each kid. It is shown through the parents impact of Debra and Albert DeMeo, and Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen Walls’s life. A good parent will strive for the success of their children. In the case of Rex and Rosemary Walls in the true story of The Glass Castle, they don’t do as such. Rex focused more on alcohol and himself than his children while his wife focused more on her sugar addiction and her artwork than anyone's welfare. Due to these dire situations, Lori, Jeanette, and Brian Walls had no support to rely on but their own. Though it seemed like a horrible situation to be in, for this dysfunctional family, it was the perfect solution. “Was...
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...The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls shows that having family in your life through tough times are important. In the book, Jeannettes Father, Rex, tells Jeannette "If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim."(66) This shows that not only Rex showed her to swim, he taught her an important lesson that if you want to succeed in life, you must learn to take care of yourself first. She may of never learned that later in life if she didn't have her Father by her side throughout her childhood teaching her life lessons. Another example is that Jeannettes mom, Rose Mary, got a job teaching to support her family. "She applied for a job and was hired right away, since she had a degree, and there were never enough teachers in Battle Mountain."(73)...
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...Jeannette Wall’s memoir portrayed in The Glass Castle, depicts the impact of education in a person’s life. Rex and Rose Mary Walls raise their children (Lori, Jeannette, Brian and Maureen), in an unusual parenting way that involve giving the children infinite independence. Even though this independence brought a lot of misfortune to the children, in terms of starving and Rex stealing their money to drink, this independence introduced a unique style of educating the children. This unique style involved not going to school for the first years of the children’s life, spending their majority of their time reading books and taught them everything they needed to know about the “world” and technology. Rex trained the children by teaching them variety...
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...Journal Entry 3; Red 1 The Glass Castle, the title of the book, was also the symbol of Rex Walls’s hope of happiness of his family, which was imaginary and unrealistic. Throughout the book, Walls promised Jeannette to build the luxurious Glass Castle with the glass ceiling and enough rooms for all the family members; and even in bad situations, the Walls Family believed the Glass Castle as the final hope to get out of the poor condition. The Glass Castle was significant for the father, because it represented his children’s trust toward him. When the children were young, they followed their father and his idea of building the Glass Castle. However, after “the hole for the Glass Castle’s foundation slowly filled with garbage”(Walls 155), the...
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...The book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls tells the story of Jeannette and her family. Jeannette certainly did not have the easiest life growing up, but she may have had one of the most interesting. I enjoyed the book because the experiences that Jeanette and her family went through make for a very exciting read. These experiences are out of the ordinary and don't represent how a typical American family would live. Jeannette was born into a rather peculiar family. She had a mother and father, and two older siblings, but the way that the family lived made them peculiar. Her parents were not the most cautious of her well being. They believed that their kids should be able to take care of themselves, and that too much parental intervention would lead kids into becoming too dependent. This said, one can imagine how the kids lived. Jeanette and her siblings were constantly in dangerous situations since supervision was limited. Walls even writes that her first memory is being on fire (9). She was making hot dogs over a stove and caught herself on fire. Her mother thought that it was a good idea to let her three year old daughter cook hotdogs over an open fire. She was alright other than a few burns and was hospitalized. Six weeks into her hospitalization her father comes to "check out, Rex Walls-style". He picks her up out of her bed and runs out of the hospital (14). Anecdotes like these are frequent in The Glass Castle. They are not all as tragic as this, but they are all very...
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...The Glass Castle: Resilience “The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.” –Robert Jordan This quote demonstrates how, in human culture, we must be flexible to change and hardship considering, rather, embracing its certain unavoidability. As a living organism, one is bound to the natural tendency to make mistakes; consequently, one is susceptible to the associated consequence of his/her actions. Concerning the above quote by author Robert Jordan, the previous statement describes the oak tree, such that the inability to adapt to the situation presented before oneself may cause such an internal conflict of resilience that he/she fails to persevere in solving the problem at hand. Supporting...
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