"The Glass Castle" tells of a 3-year-old girl who ends up in the hospital after spilling boiling water on herself as she tried to make hot dogs.

It tells of children so hungry, they devour sticks of margarine for dinner.

It tells of an alcoholic father, and a mother who lives in her own world.

And yet, despite the heartbreaking sadness of the novel, it still manages to make you laugh. Even more remarkably, it's written in a way that doesn't ask for any pity, though at times it's certainly warranted.

The memoir begins in earnest with author Jeannette Walls' trip to the hospital after severely burning herself as she tried to cook at the tender age of 3. Nurses were suspicious of the conditions at home, so her father, Rex Walls, pulled the first of many such skedaddles and ran out of the hospital to the waiting get-away car, taking his daughter with him.

At this point, you have to realize this is not a normal family and normal expectations about how a family should act do not apply. This book challenges those expectations over and over again.

The Walls family spends the first part of the book out West, traveling from one poverty-stricken town to another, and often sleeping out in the desert. While situations like this would normally make me pity the family — and I began to, as the book progressed — this is a happy time for the author. The children for the most part enjoy their crazy lives, which once again challenges the child-rearing norms.

The Walls children — Lori, Jeannette, Brian and Maureen — are always in and out of schools, depending on when their dad decides to do the "skedaddle." Their parents take it upon themselves to educate them. Walls' father discusses theoretical physics and engineering while her mother teaches English and art. Whenever the children are enrolled in schools in the first part of the book, they are always in the gifted program.

That changes when they move to Welch, W. V. and are seen as slow because they can't understand the thick accent of the region. Things fall apart, as usual, but as the children grow older, the illusions they have about their super-hero, never-do-wrong father start to fade.

The time spent in Welch is the most depressing in the story. Jeannette Walls loses her childhood belief in her father and loses any respect she had for her mother. It is a normal part of growing up to view parents in a different light, but it is at this point that Jeannette finally sees the light about her father. The siblings rely more and more on each other and work together to get out of Welch, away from their parents, and to New York.

The story moves quickly and is built on a series of anecdotes, each having its moments of joy and sadness. The family dynamic changes as the story progresses, but the four siblings are always there for each other. When Jeannette Walls gets jumped by older girls while walking home from school, her younger brother Brian gets the tar kicked out of him right alongside her.

This book is required reading for incoming freshmen as part of the "One Book, One Community" program between the city of East Lansing and MSU. But the story of this eccentric family sticking together despite shortcomings and huge obstacles is one that can be appreciated by more than just young students away from home for the first time.