The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

After only about an hour of listening to this book, I could not stop comparing this to Educated, which I listened to last year. They basically both follow the same format: a memoir of a dysfunctional family from the perspective of a child being raised in this really unusual way. Walls' parents raised her roaming around the deserts of Nevada, California, and Arizona, before moving to West Virginia. They didn't worry about things like finding food for their kids or having any sort of money or support for their kids at all. The book opens with Jeanette burning herself all over when she caught fire while trying to cook hot dogs on the stove by herself when she was three years old. They were free range parents to the extreme--they basically just let the kids run around and do anything so that the parents could do what they wanted to (for her dad, it was drinking, and for her mom, it was her "art"). After they moved to West Virginia, their lives really went downhill, and they lived in a broken-down shack with holes in the ceiling and no plumbing or trash collection. It was a really eye-opening story to hear about how some people live, when they had plenty of resources and options to do otherwise (her mom had plenty of land that she'd inherited that they could have sold, and a home that they owned back in Phoenix which they'd left to move to West Virginia). I listened to this for my book club here, and we are talking about it tonight. I'm really interested to talk about it.

The Glass Castle is set a few decades before Educated, and without the religious/Mormon background, and there were a few other differences, the most obvious one being that I felt like The Glass Castle was less obviously depressing. It seemed like their family was obviously crazy, but the kids were less torn apart by the way they were raised. Or maybe I'm just hoping that. The book description on Goodreads says it's the "moving, profound tale of unconditional love in a family," which I think is a little excessive. I don't know that that's what I would call this family. But I was interested by how the kids managed to work together to survive in the crazy world their parents created.