Book Review: The Silver Star

Silver StarThe Silver Star: A Novel
by Jeanette Walls, Fiction
(Released June, 2013)

Bottom Line: Skip it.
Summary:
When their eccentric mother (Charlotte) runs out on them yet again, twelve year old “Bean” and fifteen year old Liz Holladay flee California for their Uncle Tinsley’s rundown family mansion in Virginia.
My Thoughts: I loved The Glass Castle, Walls’ memoir about growing up in her eccentric family, so I was excited to hear she was writing her first fiction novel. Sadly, The Silver Star is no Glass Castle. This one is actually a bit hard to write about because it was so middle of the road – I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. It’s much easier to write about a book that I have strong feelings about one way or the other! The story was a bit slow and obvious, and, after a strong start, it went downhill. The first two paragraphs made me stop and say “wow”…I was simultaneously horrified and impressed in an “OK, you win the ‘listen to the horrible thing I did to my kid today’ contest” kind of way. Then, I laughed because I could totally see myself doing what Charlotte Holladay did amidst frantically loading kids into the car. Charlotte is a total flake (as the first two paragraphs so perfectly illustrate) and her oldest daughter (Liz) is the mature voice of reason – somewhat like the dynamic between Bernadette and her daughter, Bee, in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?. “Bean”, the twelve year old, is a cute character, but weirdly seems so much younger than she is. She talks more like an eight year old and plays games that I would think a thirteen year old wouldn’t find interesting anymore (i.e. she likes Cheetos because “they come in all sorts of different shapes, so you could have fun trying to figure out what each one looks like”). The first part of the book focuses more on Charlotte’s eccentric parenting and how Liz and Bean fend for themselves to get by. To me, this was the best part, probably because it is Walls’ bread and butter topic. Once Bean and Liz arrive at Uncle Tinsley’s in Virginia, the story gets a bit more of a real plot, but becomes far less entertaining reading. Bean and Liz get mixed up with a shady character in town, but the plot “twists” that come along with this are completely unsurprising. I think Walls used much too obvious foreshadowing, because I could pinpoint the one sentence that more or less gave away what was going to happen in each plot string. Plus, the characters were too black and white – there was no question who the “good guys” and “bad guys” were. I still really enjoyed Walls’ writing, I just think the story and plot lacked in this book.

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1 Comments

  1. Nancy wrote:

    I agree I was very disappointed in this book. I had to struggle to finish it.

    Posted 7.21.14 Reply

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