One of the most compelling and infuriating memoirs I've ever read. I'm kind of glad that I put off reading this for so long, because I fear that if I had read it as a teenager, I might have possessed some lingering naivete that would have cast the author's parents in a bit of a rosy, bohemian glow and rounded off some of the sharper edges of Walls's experience. As an adult, though, I felt the full indignation of witnessing two people fail their children over and over again, in ways that manage to astound despite the predictability of each failure.

Perhaps the most amazing element of The Glass Castle isn't the abuse and neglect, but the fact that Walls can write about her parents without anger.