We Have An Eye For Great Books: The Glass Castle

Who doesn't love a good memoir? There's something so wonderfully compelling about gaining access to someone's innermost thoughts. It's like finding your sister's unlocked diary with pages upon pages of intimate details waiting for you to inspect and absorb, and all without the childhood risk of being chased down the street and a threat of telling mom.

"The Glass Castle" by Jeanette Walls is a memoir that's so good, so personal, and the details are so hard to fathom that you quickly commit to go the literary distance with Walls. You'll find yourself turning pages as fast as your eyes and fingers will allow. Walls allows us into her topsy-turvy world of growing up in an alcoholic, impoverished, and wildly eccentric family. Reliant on one another and often fending for themselves, the Walls siblings are the collective voice of reason in a home filled with delusions, excuses, broken promises, and sometimes volatile situations.

Walls' parents are serial unemployed dreamers. Her artist mother is too wrapped up in covering canvases to notice her children's lack of care, while Walls' father is a daydreaming (sometimes delusional), anti-establishment nomad with a penchant for liquor. Throughout the author's childhood, she and her family would 'skedaddle' under the cover of darkness searching for the next place to stay—or avoiding debt collectors. The siblings persevere through years of skedaddles, which were always under the guise of adventure, using dogged determination, their exceptional intelligence, and a heaping helping of self-reliant wits.

This book is hard not to think about as you go about your day. You'll find yourself longing to return to where your bookmark rests amid one of the tales of a stranger-than-fiction sort of life. Whether you're a full-fledged bookworm or prefer glossy magazines, we think anyone with the spirit to survive will have a hard time putting this book down.

Share your thoughts and comments about your favorite memoirs with us below or on social using #DiscountGlasses.