Jeannette Walls

This book is a biography about a young girl who lives in poverty. Her name is Jeannette Walls she takes the reader through her life in the book. My mother has read the book before me and highly recommended it for this project. She explained the plot and I was very interested. I read the it and was very happy with the book. This story is about Jeannette Walls and how her family must travel and live in poverty. She had to live in rundown houses and sometimes didn’t have a house at all, at one point she had to live the wild desert and wrote about how she loved to sleep under the stars. Her dad throughout her life was an alcoholic and would disappear for days at a time and would come home and verbally abuse the wife and sometimes children.
The book does shows some “hippie” like aspects through the mother. Also the father likes to gamble and would often get banned from the casinos. It gives me a very personal insight on the time period. I felt that at most times I was there with her through all her troubles. The three quotes I liked out of this book the most were, “ Things usually work out in the end. But what if they dont? Then you haven't reached the end yet.” the second was “You should never hate anyone even your worst enemy, because everyone has some good in them.” and this last one had the most impact on me “ Sometimes you need a little crisis to get your adrenaline flowing so that you can realize your potential.”. I feel like these quotes are very inspiring, they were told in very tension filled times in the story. They were very important for the character as well. The time period in this book was somewhat recent so it just reinforced what I already had a pretty good idea about. She described the towns and schools that she went to with very good detail. In this time period casinos were becoming more popular in Las Vegas, which in the book her father figures out a system of counting cards to win gambling games. She grew up in the “Hippie” times, people