As I read this book, a voice in the back of my head kept saying "James Frey, James Frey..."
Maybe I am just jaded by Frey's fiction-as-fact genre, but I simply cannot believe much of the story.
Has this been fact-checked? Did the publisher try to obtain the medical records from the "burn" story. Surely Jeannette would have made them available.
The vagabond lifestyle may well have existed in America then as now, but the lucid memories from such an early age amaze me. Her seven-year-old sister a proof reader for mom? Give me a break. This is grist for a child psychologist.
Even the geographic details seem to be in error. Places described as "twenty miles away" are perhaps a hundred or more miles apart on my maps.
If the story is in any way true, I presume that Jeanette lived longer in the "whine" country than the desert.
Sorry, I just can't buy the story. Even as I saw James Frey, Augustin Burroughs et al as free and easy with the truth while they concocted equally implausible tales, I will not be surprised when Jeannette Walls is "outed" as a fantasist.