Book Club Reading Response: The Glass Castle

            The memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is about the strange lifestyle of the main character (Jeannette) and her family.  A central theme in this book is that no matter what happened to them, the character and her siblings would stick together. 

            Let’s start off by saying that Jeannette’s parents were very hard to be around.  Her father was a violent drunk and her mother was carefree spirit who only cared about her art career.  The family was very poor and they were constantly moving because the father claimed that they were being chased.   So all Jeannette, Lori, Brian, and Maureen had was each other.  At one point, the mother had a job as a teacher.  She had to rely on the kids to wake her up every morning and get her out of bed.  They even graded tests for her (74).  Therefore, they ended up getting more money because the kids did most of their mom’s work for her. 

            The kids also stuck up for each other in dangerous situations.  For example, when Jeannette and Lori caught their grandma Erma sexually harassing Brian, they told her to stop and kept a close watch on Brian from then on (147).  That winter, Erma didn’t let them have any coal or use the one bathroom that was in their house.

            All throughout the book, no matter what was going on in their lives, the siblings stayed friends and looked out for each other.  In a way, their hard childhood made them closer than ever.