Book Review - The Silver Star

My most recent book was The Silver Star by Jeannette Walls.  She is most well known for The Glass Castle which was about her life growing up in a very dysfunctional family.  She followed that by a pre-quel called Half Broke Horses, which was about her grandmother's childhood.

This book is fiction and is not related to the other two.  It is set in the 1970s  in a small town in Virginia.  The main characters are the narrator Jean "Bean" and her older sister Liz.  They are about 12 and 15 when their crazy mother leaves them alone in their house in California to follow her dream of being an entertainer.  When they realize she isn't coming back, and the creditors start knocking on the door, they use the last remaining funds they have to buy bus tickets to visit their mother's brother across the country in Virginia.

Once they arrive in Virginia they find a very different world than the one they've been raised in.  They also come to understand their mother's early life a little better.  Bean gets to meet her father's family - he had died before she was born, and it is from them that she is given the Silver Star that he was awarded in Vietnam.

The book raises issues of race.  Bean's English class is reading To Kill A Mockingbird and discussing it at the same time that the school the girls are going to has been integrated.  There are some situations that happen to the girls that are sort of reminiscent of some of the events of TKAM (at least thematically if not literally).

When the book was released earlier this summer, there was a review of it in the local paper.  The review was not totally complimentary, but I had already purchased the book and was determined to read  it because I had enjoyed Walls' other books.  I did like this book overall, and I looked forward to my reading time to see what was going to happen next.  I don't agree with the criticisms of the reviewer;  however, I will say I was very disappointed in the ending.  I'm not going to give it away in case some of you are going to read it.  If you do, let me know, and we'll discuss the ending.  I just sort of felt it was a cop-out and an easy way to end the book.

Yes, I would recommend it, but I would not call it an "intense" read.

:) Amy