Walls Being Transparent
Customer Rating: 
I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, so it wasn't until I was laying in bed one evening, several months after reading this book, that an idea finally connected in my mind: If you want a book on "How my dysfunctional family overcame our serious problems, and here's how you can too," this is NOT that book.
Jeannette Walls' intent is NOT to try and persuade you she knows how to make the world a better place. Rather, she intimately shows you the good and bad parts of her story growing up. She shows you what the people close to her did. She tries to infer what their thought processes might have been. And she shares her thought processes.
It took several months for my mind to put together this idea: The book's title not only brings attention to her brilliant father's intermittent pursuits to literally build a glass castle (and the effects his focus on that ambitious and likely illusory pursuit had on her family), but also the book itself is a glass castle, giving readers a brutally revealing look at the complex workings of her arguably dysfunctional family members.
Walls does not appear intent on supplying the "answers" to the problems she faced growing up. Instead, she clearly represents the characters, actions, and consequences for readers to make their own observations and evaluations. Walls may have thought her book could be of some benefit to readers who have suffered or are suffering similarly to how she suffered. Walls may believe there can be some benefit in openly publicizing and making transparent many of the things most people hide.
