Memoirs covered in coffee...

Have you ever rescued a book from locker clean out?

Specifically, have you ever seen a coffee-stained book headed for a trash can and shouted, "Don't throw out a perfectly good book!" Well, I did.

Actually, I rescued this book a little while ago, but I was cleaning off my bookshelves at the end of the year and found The Glass Castle, which was a summer reading book option for students in Grade 12. As I haven't had seniors in a few years, I did not get to their entire summer reading list at the time. However, I was looking for a few good books, and after a wonderful essay a certain sophomore wrote this year about coffee and life, I thought the coffee-stained book was just what summer ordered.

Now, let me just say, you will not need coffee to read this book. I was hooked from the very first sentence:

"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."

What followed is an intriguing introduction that leads to a "flashback" of sorts, reflecting upon the author's childhood. It begins with her first memory of being in the hospital after an accident that left her severely burned...a memory which ended with her parents snatching her from the hospital and journeying to a new home.

The Glass Castle was a heart-wrenching true story told by Jeannette, the second oldest child in the family, about growing up in severe poverty with parents who had problems with alcohol and "normal life." However, this isn't one of those stories that requires a box of Kleenex to read. The way Walls tells the story makes it sound like a crazy adventure...at least until she is old enough to know better. The early stories of her childhood, like falling out of their car on a desert highway, are told in a way that are funny instead of sad, so you sort of laugh when her first grade self and her siblings get into a shoot-out with the neighbor's kid.

Of course, by the time the family reaches West Virginia and moves into a house that has no electricity or running water, Jeanette begins to realize that she wants a different life. From this point, the story becomes both sadder and more inspiring, as she and her sister work to do what it takes to escape the extreme poverty that plagues the family.

I would recommend this book to most students in high school and adults too. While there are some mature themes (i.e. threats of molestation and a particularly disturbing scene where Jeanette's father takes her teenage self to a bar to help him scam some money), if that does not bother families, I think the overall messages are positive. This shows how perspective can make anything better, and this shows how perseverance (and sacrifice) make a difference. Although this story illustrates how some people are dealt a terrible hand in life that is almost impossible to recover from, it is done in such a caring way that a reader tends to feel genuine sympathy, as if this family were the family next door instead of a family "in some book."

So in the end, I guess it was fitting that I rescued this book from the garbage, but even better that I was able to read this page-turner. Oh, and apparently this is being made into a movie, and so read the book now so you can look down on the movie! (JK, but seriously, read the book!)

Happy reading!