Book review: The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

I picked this up on a friend's recommendation, and I am so glad I did!

Here's the info from the back of the book:
"The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply disfunctional and uniquely vibrant.  When sober, Jeannette's brillant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology and how to embrace life fearlessly.  But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive.  Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family. 

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves.  They fed, clothed and protected one another and eventually found their way to New York.  Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered. 

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family."

I don't usually seek out memoirs, but I was truly captured by Jeannette Walls story.  Growing up with her through the book, I felt her childlike adoration and pride in her unique upbringing, her teenage embarrassment and anguish, the eventual disappointment and disgust and finally the acceptance of her parents, as if her family were my own.  This tale had me laughing out loud, cringing in mortification, aching with pain and swelling with hope.  It truly is a MUST READ!