Books worth Reading

The Glass Castle chronicles the life of writer Jeanette Walls. At the book's beginning she is three years old and living in a trailer in Arizona where she severely burns herself while making hot dogs. She is hospitalized, but her father, Rex, grabs her and takes her from the hospital before she is released. Not long after this incident Rex comes home one evening and tells the family to grab only what they need and get in the car. The family then begins a transient existence in which they live briefly in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and various small desert towns. During this time Rex holds various jobs at various mines and seeks to perfect a new device for more efficiently mining gold. He tells his family numerous tall tales about his past, and claims that in the future he will build a Glass Castle that they will all live in. He even draws up blueprints. Mary, Jeanette's mother has a baby which brings the total of children to 4 (Maureen, Brian, Jeannette, Lori in order from youngest to oldest). Eventually, the family settles in a town called Battle Mountain. Here, the family lives in a rented home, where the children sleep in cardboard boxes. The children go to school and Rex gets a job at a barite mine. Despite a house full of wayward animals (everything from cats to a wounded vulture) the Walls live a fairly normal existence. There are children to play with and there is food to eat. When Rex loses his job at the mine things get tougher and Jeanette must steal from other children's school lunches to eat. Eventually Mary gets a teaching job, which she hates. Rex in the meantime is spending most of his time in bars, drinking and gambling, at one point hiring a prostitute from a local brothel that Jeanette and Brian often pass by and wonder about. A boy named Billy moves to town who is a couple of years older than Jeanette. He is a juvenile delinquent, thought to have tortured animals, and also proclaims Jeanette his girlfriend. Jeanette does not return his affection but accepts a ring that he gives to her. One day while playing hide and go seek, he attempts to rape her. Fortunately he is unsuccessful. Jeanette returns his ring. That evening Billy comes to the Walls' house while the parents are away, breaks out a window and begins firing his BB gun at the children. The Walls' children retaliate by locating their father's pistol and firing at him. A police car arrives with the Walls' parents inside of it. The officer informs Rex and Mary that they must appear before a magistrate in the morning. That night, they pack up and leave town. The Walls then move to a house in Phoenix Arizona that Rose Mary inherited from her mother. The house is large but infested with Roaches. Their neighbors are Gypsies who steal from the Walls. The neighborhood also hosts a number of sexual predators, one of whom enters the Walls house and propositions Jeanette before being scared off by Brian who is wielding a hatchet. Rex works as an electrician, and the family has money that Mary inherited, but when he loses his job his drinking gets to a dangerous level. Jeanette asks him to quit drinking as her tenth birthday present. He tries and fails.When the money runs out, Jeanette's parents begin performing petty cons at drive through bank windows for money. One evening after a drunken fight, Rose Mary decides that the family will move to West Virginia where Rex's parents are.