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Junior also lives with his Grandmother Spirit and his older sister, Mary, who moved into the basement after high school despite her intelligence.

With more support, Junior thinks his mother would have been a college professor, and his father would have been a musician. Although devastated by losing Oscar, Junior loves his parents and explains, “we reservation Indians don’t get to realize our dreams” (13). Without the money to take Oscar to the vet, his parents decide Junior’s father must shoot Oscar with a rifle. Junior and his family live in inescapable poverty, which he illustrates early in the novel with an anecdote about his sick dog, Oscar.

Junior includes his humorous drawings throughout the novel, offering further insight into how he sees the world. He dreams of becoming a great cartoonist, and he believes making art is the only way he might someday escape the reservation. Mostly Junior stays home and draws cartoons of his family and his best friend, Rowdy. On the reservation, his peers bully him for his differences, and he is frequently beaten up. As a child, he grew 42 teeth (and had 10 pulled) and had frequent seizures as a 14-year-old, he has a stutter and a lisp, a large head, and poor eyesight for which he wears thick glasses. Born with hydrocephaly and expected to die in infancy, Junior survived with several lasting effects. The book is in first-person diary format, narrated by Arnold “Junior” Spirit Jr., a 14-year-old American Indian and aspiring cartoonist who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington.