The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls..?

Question

How does Jeannette being poor affect her as a person? What sturggles does she have to face and go thorugh?

please help me out with this one. And no stupid one word answers. thanks. :)

Answer 1

I haven’t read this book, but these links may help you with your work.

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monk...

http://thebestnotes.com/booknotes/Glass_...

http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-g...

Answer 2

Until her rootless, feckless family — consisting of her parents Rex and Rose Mary, two sisters, and a brother — came to roost in a leaking, plumbing-free shack in Welsh, W.Va., the kids were squashed into the back of whatever ramshackle automobile Walls's father wired together. Aimlessly, sometimes looking for work for Rex or a bar where the adults could party, they wandered the highways and byways of the great Southwest. What money they scrounged went for gas, Rex's cigarettes and beer, and Rose Mary's art supplies.

At night, they would set up camp on the desert floor or find an abandoned hovel and if lucky, cardboard boxes to sleep in. When they occasionally found a place to stay, they often left in a hurry, pulling what Rex playfully called a "skidaddle" to escape the hot pursuit of what he told the hapless children was the FBI or CIA trying to steal his ideas, information, or his secret knowledge of conspiracies afoot in the land.

On the move, her mother, a self-styled "excitement freak," lived in a pastel netherworld in the front seat blithely labeling everything that happened an "adventure" and telling the children how lucky they were. Instead of boring cooking and cleaning, Rose Mary would paint and read Balzac. When they finally settled for good in a hut clinging to the side of a mountain in Welsh, W.Va., she announced that it was the perfect place to be because, as an artist, there wouldn't be any competition in a town that small. What pennies they scrapped together she spent on canvas and brushes.

Rose Mary's motherly advice ran the gamut from assuring the kids that a ham from a dumpster with green mold on it was often perfectly fine in the center, to warning Jeannette and her sisters that wearing white after Labor Day was not the done thing. Because they had no toys, Rex would fashion cardboard toboggans when they had snow, made costumes out of old army blankets and wove endless stories of the wonders to come in their lives. Because they had no radio, TV, or social life, they read books Rose Mary brought from the public library and collected shiny rocks.

Rex promised a shimmering Xanadu was just around the corner. There he would build them their glass castle. When the starving little band settled into the listing shack in Welsh, Jeannette and her brother dug an enormous hole on the slope to start the castle in which they utterly believed. Ray couldn't or wouldn't pay to have the weekly garbage picked up. Guess where it went?

In reality, she had made it through the public high school in the dismal mining town eating other kids' leftover lunches, living in a home devoid of running water — let alone hot water — and washing her face in snow. It is not without irony that we note that the TV-and-toy-free Walls kids had the highest grades in their classes.

By 17, Jeannette was ready to escape the grinding poverty and the dysfunction of her family. She climbed aboard a Trailways bus for New York City and watched her tearful father, who gave her a jackknife as a parting gift, recede into the distance. Once in the city, she found menial work and asked where the best college was. She was told Barnard College, a part of Columbia University. Her mother's breezy assurances that her kids could do anything they wanted to do finally paid off. She didn't know it was impossible to get in with no money and no clout. So she applied, won grants and scholarships, went, and eventually graduated, only to receive a pay-phone call from her parents. They were in New York so that they could all be family again. and no, they didn't want help. They would be just fine. They would live in their old van parked on a city street or, failing that, in Central Park. And they did.

The story of how she managed this development is as riveting as her earlier years.

In interviews, Jeannette has said she was convinced that if she admitted to her real background, she would lose all her friends and even her job. Now, with the encouragement and emotional support of her writer husband, John Taylor, and her own extraordinary ability to relive pain, she has told that story.

Amazingly, for all the stomach-clenching disappointment, broken promises, humiliation, and relentless perversity on the part of her psychotic parents, this is a love story. As wacko as they were, as dangerously irresponsible (Jeanette burned herself terribly trying to cook a hot dog when she was three. Her father kidnapped her after six weeks in the hospital in order to skip out on the bill), Rex and Rose Mary loved their kids and that love was returned. That love illuminates the work like the stars Ray "gives" each child on a toyless, foodless Christmas night.

The Glass Castle will at times exhaust you, occasionally fill you with fury, and finally leave you in slack jawed wonderment at the resilience of the human spirit, the inborn need for family love and the remarkable strength of the author herself as Walls recounts her life free of self-p