The Glass Castle: A Memoir / Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls’s gritty memoir The Glass Castle, an account of her wacky childhood, captured people’s imagination as evidenced by its sustained popularity. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 100 weeks and was in constant demand in the library and has been a popular choice for book clubs. Now a movie is in the works, with Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence rumored to head the cast.

The glass castle of the title is the fantasy house father Rex Walls promises his family he will build for them one day when luck turns his way. Luck never does turn his way. Certainly no glass castle, the reality of what he provides for his family is quite different—a transient life, food shortages, living in tumbledown houses until the authorities start to sniff around, their father loses his job, or conditions otherwise become so unbearable that the family must move on. Throughout their childhood of degradation, the Walls children seem to regard much of what’s thrown at them as just another great adventure. Maybe this is survival instinct, because it does keep the family together almost to the end, when the kids finally break with their parents and move to New York City and try to shape their own futures.

Readalikes: Running with Scissors, Liars’ Club

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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