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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Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

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

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