Jeannette Walls

First, I must say, the print in this edition (the red book) is so tiny I'd recommend an alternate edition. This is described as a "true-life novel" as the author tells the story of her grandmother and her mother ending with herself in a first-person voice. It's an interesting story of a pure western woman working and living on a ranch. She's an early feminist who lead a rugged lifestyle which she passed on to her daughter which may explain why her daughter grew up to be the person she was. I recommend reading this before "The Glass Castle" which follows chronologically from here. I also like this better than the latter. A fun and sometimes series look at a way of life that was ending as the grandmother lived out her life.… (meer)

I had expected this to be a five-star read for me but I ended up finding it only mediocre. This is a memoir of Jeannette's childhood growing u[ neglected, travelling from state to state, and finally ending up in Appalachia. Her father was an engineering genius and a violent alcoholic. Her mother was educated and intelligent but also flighty and suffered from depression. It was under these circumstances that the author and her three siblings raised themselves. I found the writing to be rather abrupt and it took me a while to get into it. Also rather than a cohesive narrative, it was a sequence of vignettes with no segues. I didn't feel connected to the story but did find it to be both sad and interesting. A decent read that just didn't live up to the hype for me.… (meer)

Walls revisits a recurring theme here, with a young woman, essentially motherless, who is thrust by circumstance into a culturally unexpected role, and meets it with grit and determination.

Sallie Kincaid’s mother dies (under circumstances no one is allowed to discuss) when Sallie is little more than a toddler. She’s then banished to live with an aunt a few years later when a childish adventure inadvertently injures her young stepbrother, summoned back only on her stepmother’s death, years later. But the anticipated joyous homecoming with the father she worships is soured when his only welcome is to instruct her to “make a Kincaid” out of the timid, music-loving teen.

Things never really slow down in this tale, as death, family feuds, and unexpected pregnancies erupt, and the passage of the 18th Amendment upends the economy of the rural southern county Duke Kincaide had treated as his personal fiefdom. By this time, Sallie is the de facto, if not the legally-empowered heir to the Kincaid business empire, and she finds herself backed into corner after corner in a time and place when women were not expected – and frequently not allowed – to do what was considered “a man’s job”.

Walls has drawn on a number of historical incidents from the region during the Prohibition era, and she has also underlaid her story with a far older saga. Some readers will quickly pick it up; others may never see it. For this reader, once seen, it couldn’t be unseen, and it wavered between being a distraction and being a spoiler.

Sallie’s adventures at time border on the unbelievable, particularly given her youth and inexperience when she is thrust into a role she thought she wanted. How she comes, first, to assume it and, ultimately, to question its value, are the most emotionally complex of the many threads running through the work… (meer)