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The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls: An Analysis

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Eight years ago, I walked alongside my cousin on the way to school. The bustling downtown LA traffic did not stop us. We walked down the crime-filled streets, crossed the hazardous streets, and eventually made it to our destinations. Enrolled in preschool where I danced and played happily with my friends, no one would guess that I was usually at home crestfallen without anybody looking after me. My dad was working 3 low wage jobs, my mom sewing at a clothing factory, and I was walking back and forth from school and home. My cousin’s parents were working too so we had no one to really take care of us. The adults were all working desperately to try to pay the rent for a down trodden house that could barely hold both families. Contrary to our pessimistic views, my cousin and I still grew up to be one of the hardest working students and one of the smartest in each of our classes. I recently read several …show more content…
Walls starts with her memory of being on fire. She writes “I was on fire” at three years old after cooking hot dogs for herself(9). She remembers how she felt, writing “I felt a blaze of heat on my right side . . . the yellow-white flames [making] a ragged brown line . . . then the flames leaped up, reaching my face”(9). Walls shows the reader that she lived in poverty with no one to take care her. Using her childhood as contrast, she writes about what happened after she grew up. She describes how she eventually bought a house and even got money to celebrate Thanksgiving. Walls details the house, explaining that the “wide-plank floorboards, the big fireplaces . . . an Egyptian couch . . . the smell of the roasting turkey John had prepared, with a stuffing of sausage, mushrooms, walnuts, apples”(Walls 287). Walls asserts to the reader that even though she had grown up with no money, she survived and made it to a successful

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