Books: The Parent Booby Trap

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It is heartbreaking to watch Walls and her three siblings try. When her father takes her to the zoo, he has her reach into the cheetah's cage to pet it. One year, with no money for Christmas presents, he has her just pick out a star in the night sky: "We laughed about all the kids who ... got nothing for Christmas but a bunch of cheap plastic toys."

They live off popcorn, cat food, margarine mixed with sugar, crates of cantaloupes that fell off a train and worse. "Why spend the afternoon making a meal that will be gone in an hour," her mother asks her hungry kids, with glittery-eyed logic, "when in the same amount of time, I can do a painting that will last forever?" Finally they fetch up in a tiny, tilting, unplumbed house in the Appalachians. "'It's good we raised you young 'uns to be tough,' Dad says. 'Because this is not a house for the faint of heart.'"

Walls, who is a gossip columnist, is a dead-on, dry-eyed portraitist, both of others and of herself. She writes without a drop of self-pity, and she never makes the mistake of allowing her parents to become monsters: they're always flawed yet recognizably human, desperately trying to be themselves and instead destroying everyone around them. The book takes its title from her father's dream house, a fanciful transparent mansion powered by solar energy that he sincerely seems to believe he will one day build. He never does construct his Glass Castle, of course, but we can be grateful and relieved that Walls survived to create hers. •