Outside Reading- Week 4, Post B

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

The section of the book I read this week was really good. I mostly read about the family’s life in Welch and their continuous hardships. In this section Jeannette becomes more independent, especially when her mother goes to renew her degree and is gone for months in the summer. Because her dad is gone most of the time, she is left as head of the household.

I was especially interested about when the child welfare man came. If I was her I would tell him the truth and want him to help me. I think Jeannette was just too scared about what would happen to her siblings. Throughout her childhood Jeannette has always relied on her siblings and is very close to them, I don’t know what she would do without them. Also I think she feels she needs to protect them, like she says “At times I felt like I was failing Maureen, like I wasn’t keeping the promise I’d made to her when I held her on the way home from the hospital after she’d been born.”(pg 206). Another reason I think that she told the child welfare man to go away was because she was scared of what her parents would do to her.

Though I felt bad for Jeannette because so much bad was happening to her, I was also very excited because Jeannette started writing on the newspaper, which I think gave her more confidence and made her at least a little happier as her life basically fell apart. This also is foreshadowing to her writing career and how good she became at writing with little education, “Miss Bivens told me that as far she could remember, I was the only seventh-grader who’d ever worked for the Wave.” (pg 203).

I think that this book is really good and I am looking forward to what will happen next.