I don’t know what it is about Jeannette Walls that intrigues me so. Maybe it’s her fast talking (so fast she’s hard to understand) or her crazy childhood (portrayed in The Glass Castle) and her crazier mother. Whatever it is, I know I will never miss one of her books. Silver Star is a step out for Walls – a step away from herself and her endlessly write-about-able family. Silver Star is straight up fiction.
As the book opens, we meet sisters Liz and Bean and their dysfunctional aspiring actress of a mother. When the mother takes off on a soul-searching journey, the two sisters decide the best thing to do to avoid being caught by the bandersnatchers (police/child services) is to hightail it across the country to stay with their estranged uncle. The bus from California to Virginia takes only a portion of a chapter, and the rest of the story lies in the small town where her mother grew up.
Initially I thought this would be a story of two sisters and their fraught relationship with their mother. But that theme seemed to ebb and flow – at times it was central, other times the focus seemed to switch to race relations (the high school the girls attend having just integrated) with all the “To Kill a Mockingbird” references you would expect. When something tragic happens to one of the sisters, the family must come together to overcome it. I flew through this book, enjoyed the characters and found the plot strong enough to move me along. But in thinking back on it, it was really pretty scattered!