Time is the Great Depression.1930's.Unmarried teen-ager chooses life for her unborn son despite many difficulties. .Cross-eyed and pudgy, he is teased a lot (hence book's title) .Mother must give him up, elderly grandparents are only choice. They proceed to raise him through trials and errors, some serious, some humorous. Conservative farm folks from the Ozarks, they apply old fashioned rules of character which shape his life, while others in the little Ozark town keep him on the proper path. At the end of the story he is on his way to college, first person in his family to do so and is reunited with his mother in the night of her death.