The narrator, Jeannette Walls, is now growing up. From the beginning of the book when she was just about three years of age, she believed that everything was an adventure; moving from place to place, riding in an U-Haul trailer, exploring in the dessert. When Jeannette becomes a fifth grader the family moves to Welch, West Virginia, and the harshness of reality begins to set in; realities such as extreme hunger.
While her children were starving and digging through garbage just to find something edible, the mother had been hiding food and eating it for herself. A good mother would have split the food with her four children, but this is an example of what hunger and greed could do to a person. I don't personally think this is right, but I have never been in a situation like this.
Also, as Jeannette enters middle school, she gets bullied. Children call her names like "spider-legs, skeleton girl, and bony butt" because she is so skinny. Even when she would be on the playground in fifth grade, she got jumped by a gang of girls every day, and made fun of since she had no buttons on her thrift-store coat. This must have been very hard to endure, especially since she had no one to talk to about it; all of her siblings were going through the same thing and she feared that her parents might go to the school and saying something that would make it worse.
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