In hilarious and often heartbreaking detail, Joan Heartwell recreates her youthful determination to achieve an unremarkable life after having been placed by rascally fate at the center of a super-dysfunctional, chaotic, and downwardly mobile family. In Part 1, Heartwell leads readers into a lively "coming of age in the sixties" in which her pursuit of ordinariness is constantly foiled by the shame of being the "white sheep" in a family that includes special needs siblings, a shoplifting grandmother, and parents totally bewildered by their lot in life. Part 2 is narrated by an adult Heartwell, who, having become the sole caretaker for her siblings, resorts to extraordinary measures to locate the midpoint between their needs and her own. Brilliant and magical, Hamster Island takes its rightful place among such darkly comic and original memoirs as Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors and Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle.