By Katherine Paterson
A tough, angry foster child schemes to escape the home she's landed in, right up until she realizes it became the one she wanted.
Gilly Hopkins is eleven, whip-smart, and impossible on purpose. She's been bounced through so many foster homes she's stopped bothering to be good in any of them, because the only person she wants is a birth mother she barely remembers and has turned into a dream. When she's placed with Maime Trotter, a big, warm, semi-literate woman, and a shy little boy named W.E., Gilly does everything she can to wreck it: she's rude, she steals, she runs a cruel scheme to get money and get away. And then, slowly, without meaning to, she starts to love them. Which is exactly when a grandmother she's never met arrives to take her away. It's funny and sharp and it does not tie up with a bow, and that's why it has stayed with readers for decades.
For a child who has moved through placements themselves, Gilly is a rare thing: a foster child written from the inside, allowed to be angry and difficult and still the hero. Paterson refuses to make her sweet or make foster care simple. And the ending, where Gilly finally has a home and has to leave it, tells a hard truth gently, that loving a family and getting to keep them aren't always the same thing. It's a book to be read alongside a grown-up who can talk about the feelings it stirs.