BOOK REVIEW: Girl With Glasses by Marissa Walsh

I started wearing glasses when I was six years old (with a plaster over one lens, but the less said about that the better). Marissa Walsh also started wearing glasses as a child and has written this memoir about how being a Girl With Glasses (GWG) has been a defining characteristic of her life.

From how her glasses made other people see her to how her glasses helped her to see (both, of course, literally and figuratively) and also prevented her from seeing, Girl With Glasses is really a series of short vignettes from Walsh's life.

It's a very easy read and I'm not sure it's going to be a particularly memorable one, but I did enjoy it. Some of the stories were sweet, some were sad, some were charming and some were funny. I would have liked a bit more detail in parts - I felt sometimes that she was hiding behind the glasses theme and it would have been better to flesh some of the stories out more and add some context, but that might just be me.

A sweet book that would make a nice gift for the GWG in your life (I would have loved to have read this as a teenager before I had totally embraced my four-eyed state).

Comments

[diane]

"I would have liked a bit more detail in parts - I felt sometimes that she was hiding behind the glasses theme and it would have been better to flesh some of the stories out more and add some context, but that might just be me."

No, I totally agree! I thought it would be more of a memoir, and think her voice was engaging enough that it could have been. It's a shame she related *everything* (being shy etc) to having glasses, even when it was a stretch, or a stereotype, and rarely went deeper.

It was a nice read though, a little poignant and well-written. x

[Michelle]

I've worn glasses now since before my third birthday. And they were those huge lenses that magnified my entire face. It took me a very long time to embrace glasses. Especially when my dad kept buying me red plastic frames. So this one sounds kind of sweet, like you said, something I might have liked to have read in my teenage years.