"The Silver Star," a Novel by Jeannette Walls Jeannette Walls's new novel, "The Silver Star," is systematically built, each brick put in place for a reason. It's easy to understand why writing fiction makes Ms. Walls so methodical. Her memoir, "The Glass Castle," told a far more painful story, and Ms. Walls surely knows that her personal history colors perceptions of whatever else she writes. "The Glass Castle" remains on best-seller lists eight years after it first appeared. In her case, the truth is stranger and messier than fiction. Those feckless, self-involved parents helped (if that's the word) make her famous. They also unwittingly gave her affinities for structure and order. Ms. Walls's tough, uncluttered narrative style saved a potentially tear-jerking horror story from voyeurism and sentimentality. That same good sense and moxie got her through "Half Broke Horses," in which she faced down the dreaded challenge of following up a monster hit. But to tell the story of one of Ms. Walls's grandmothers, "Half Broke Horses" had to walk an uneasy line between memoir and fiction. It wound up qualifying as a novel - just barely. Not until now, on her third go-round, is she ready to make things up. "The Glass Castle" haunts "The Silver Star." Once again, the narrator is a girl with an erratic mother, and that girl has to raise herself without much help. But now Ms. Walls can deliver the wish-fulfilling version of her girlhood. So the mother in this novel exclaims: "How dare you speak to me like that? I'm your mother. And Bean, the 12-year-old heroine, replies: "Then act like one for a change. We wouldn't be in this whole mess if you had been acting like a mom all along. Here is Ms. Walls's chance to elicit cheers from the bleachers. Did Bean, whose real name is Jean, wind up with that nickname because Scout was already taken? There's a lot of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in "The Silver Star," enough to remind readers that Harper Lee chose to quit while she was ahead. There are also elements of Dickens, as befit Ms. Walls's truly Dickensian girlhood, and Lewis Carroll, who knew how to make illogic seem perfectly sane. Bean's older half-sister, Liz, especially loves "Through the Looking-Glass." And both girls use Carroll's "bandersnatch" as a label for "do-gooding government busybodies" who, given Mom's tendency to run away from home, might try to seize them. "The Silver Star" takes place early in the Nixon presidency, when the Vietnam War is roiling, Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell are all the rage and Charlotte Holladay, the girls" mother, thinks she ought to be a singer. "Mom was going through a rough period at the time and had a lot on her mind - craziness, craziness, craziness, she'd say later," Bean explains on the first page. That page also cites "the night the whole mess started," in a textbook display of Ms. Walls's blunt way of snagging the reader's attention. When Mom runs off, the girls quickly decide to go from California to Byler, Va., the Holladay family's hometown. They discover a lonely relative in a neglected family manse (see "Great Expectations"), but Uncle Tinsley quickly morphs from a curmudgeon into a treasure. And Bean finds out the identity of her father: he was Charlie Wyatt, whose Silver Star from the Korean War gives the book its title. "This ain't a shaking family, it's a hugging family!" a Wyatt aunt exclaims when Liz extends a hand to her. Spunky Bean is also told about Charlie Wyatt: "You got his spark, I do believe." Mom drops back into the book for a bipolar, borderline abusive episode or two. "No one understands how hard it is to be me." But Liz and Bean soon realize that they've got to make their own way. So they need jobs. And the story needs a villain. Along comes the wicked Jerry Maddox, who talks about himself in the third person ("You can trust Jerry Maddox"), has arms like hams, mistreats his wife and generally has more evil traits than a dog has fleas. It's very easy to fall into Ms. Walls's country idiom while reading her. "The Silver Star" will drum up suspense, "God willing and the creek don't rise." It has to. For one thing, Byler's high school is being integrated for the first time, and the new black students don't like having to read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in English class. "No one's challenging the system," one of them accurately observes about the black characters in the story. But Ms. Walls builds a "Mockingbird"-like courtroom scenario into her book anyway. And Bean's cries of "Dirtbag liar!" don't keep injustice from being done. Ultimately, the half-sisters come of age, taking responsibility for themselves and harnessing every metaphor Ms. Walls sets up for them. The emus in this book yield not just a fun emu-chasing scene but Bean's chance to say, about Liz: "Both she and the emus wanted to fly - they just didn't have the wings they needed." Also, from Bean: "They look like they shouldn't exist." From Liz: "That's what makes them so special." Not even a chestnut tree in "The Silver Star" gets to stand around without doing double duty. "Trees don't wonder about things," Bean's cousin says. They just grow. And not even the dog named Dog lacks a plot function. As for the Silver Star medal, it's bound to reappear at moments when Bean thinks about courage. And it's not unwelcome. This is a book in which nothing is complicated, good and bad are polar opposites and life never fails to make sense, in a hokey and homespun way. No need to feel "as guilty as the hound dog who stole the hambone" for swallowing that.