A memorable and balanced - if hard to get through at times - autobiography 
 I'm of two minds about this book. On one hand, I don't regret reading through it once and appreciate how Walls shows both the good and ugly sides of her parents and her life with them. She avoids vilifying them or trying to excuse their faults and narrates her experiences in a generally matter-of-fact -- but still engaging -- style that doesn't opt for an easy "my parents were complete monsters who made my childhood a living hell" or "I forgive my parents for all the hardship they put us through because they genuinely loved us" portrayal. You really get the sense from her writing that while she's fully aware of her parents' selfishness and flightiness, they were still an integral part of what made her the person she was and she can never distance herself from them completely. 
 On the other hand, I can't see myself rereading it any time soon. Walls may have done a fine job depicting her parents as people instead of monsters or saints, but it didn't stop me from wanting to leap into the pages to strangle them multiple times while reading. I even wound up skimming sections of it when I became sick of reading account after account of Rex and Mary Rose thoughtlessly screwing up things for their children yet again. There's doing one's best to cope with hard circumstances and no alternatives and then there's flat-out refusing to work even when you have the education to do so and stealing all the money your children were saving up entirely on their own to afford a better life! 
 I know The Glass Castle was based on Walls's real life and that my complaint of how I couldn't read all of the events in depth can be taken as my upper-middle-class self just not being able to bear reading about the hardships that are all too familiar to many people in real life, but I do think that Walls could have devoted a little less page time on her parents' repeating patterns of behavior and a little more page time on her New York experiences. I don't doubt that her parents contributed to her growing up into a successful and self-sufficient woman for all their flaws, but it's clear that her decision (and Lori's) to break away from them to live her own life was a huge factor in her growing up into that woman too and that decision arguably comes too late into the narrative to have the maximum emotional impact or time left to show how this decision shaped her future as much as, if not more than, her parents did. Not only that, but her parents' own experiences in New York would have been interesting to read in more detail too. 
 I also think the Thanksgiving chapter was unnecessary and felt like a tacked-on "happy ending." After reading almost 300 pages of Walls showing her family in all their dreams and dysfunctions and her taking care to not spin an easy moral message from her life, an unconditionally happy-all-around family gathering that almost seemed to be jumping up and down and saying eagerly, "See? Even after all the troubles we went through, we're still a loving family at our core!" fell flat for me. Ending the memoir right after the death of Jeannette's father and Jeannette proving to have an echo of her father's restlessness in her would have been an ending that fit much better with the unsentimental tone of the rest of the book and its overall theme on how 'belonging' to a home can be difficult even with one available. 
 In spite of my issues with The Glass Castle, however, I give this a positive rating of 4 stars because it did an excellent job overall at getting me emotionally invested in its complex characters (even the ones I wanted to smack repeatedly) and making me believe that Walls really did depict her family as fairly as she could. I felt furious, helpless, and reluctant to keep reading in turns but I never felt manipulated into feeling a specific emotion or opinion about Walls's upbringing the way I do with more heavy-handed books (with the partial exception of the final chapter, as explained above). I will not be rereading this book without at least a lengthy period of time to digest it, but I'm glad I chose to read it and get a taste of a way of living that typically isn't chronicled this extensively in the literature I read.