The Glass Castle / by Jeanette Walls

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Discontented with your, relatively speaking, compatible living conditions in Arizona, your parents decide to uproot you and your three siblings and promptly settle in West Virginia. That kind of gumption might fly with the Robinsons, but in real life, as they say, 'it rolls downhill'; even living at the top of a hill as you do in the lean-to, shanty-of-shack you now call home. Having permanently entrenched in coal country, your parents essentially relieve themselves of responsibility, conspicuously devoting their lives to sloth and indigence while you bare the brunt of their unfortunate choices.

This particular 'Your' life was, in fact, the hard-scrabble yet comically-driven youth endured by current MSNBC journalist Jeanette Walls. What begins as a considerably upbeat family-on-the-move adventure evolves into a rather tragic narrative of poverty and privation before Jeanette, at 17, takes matters into her own hands, leaving her family for New York City. Her father 'Rex', a foremost nonconformist and wannabe inventor-entrepeneur, may as well bare the blame for the whole mess. While it's his charisma which drives things forward, he constantly fumbles away family priorities, ultimately succumbing to despair, dissipation and neglect by the book's second half. Even then, he manages to consume a multitude of Jeanette's compassion, empathy and dignity; not to mention large quantities of her money prior to his premature, alcohol-induced death at 55.

With traumatic childhoods all the rage, one more over-indulgent memoir can't hurt things too much. For all the problems Walls and her (now moderately successful) siblings faced growing up, she still loves her parents as if they were the enlightened visionaries they aimed at being rather than the deadbeat losers they exemplified((-y); her mother still claws through garbage around NYC)). It entertains though; which is enough to establish it as the perfect book club book for mainstream readers.