The story of The Glass Castle takes you on a journey through childhood from the point of Jeanette Wells. Jeanette lived through a lot of incidents that can be tied into social psychology and how people react to the situations they are put into. While we may not relate to her life of moving and extreme poverty, we can boil down her life situations into concepts that everyone can relate to and has been through. The Glass Castle starts with Jeannette as an adult witnessing her mother rooting through a dumpster in New York City. We travel back to when Jeanette was three years old in Arizona and the dress she was wearing had caught fire while she was cooking. After six weeks in the hospital, her father Rex, mother Rose Mary, older sister Lori, …show more content…
They were constantly picking up and moving to a new place, mostly to escape legal responsibilities, but Jeanette’s father told them they were escaping and all the moves were temporary. The ultimate goal was for Jeanette’s father to build the glass castle, which would be their home made of glass. Glass ceilings, walls and stairs and the house would be powered by the sun. They moved to Las Vegas, Midland, Blythe, Battle Mountain where we spent a large majority of the story, Phoenix where Rose Mary’s mother had lived and died leaving a house for Rose Mary and the family, and then to Welch where Jeanette’s father grew up. We met Rex’s mother and father and his brother Stanley. After an incident where Rex’s mother Erma was caught molesting Brian, the family moved to a house essentially made of rocks, plywood and cardboard. By then there was another child Maureen and the children were old enough to realize that their family was not like everyone else’s. Rex was suffering from alcoholism and while it wasn’t discussed, her mother Rose Mary possibly had a mental illness where sometimes she was excited to go and teach in the random elementary schools in the random towns they lived in and other times she wouldn’t get out of bed. She had a college degree