The Great Gilly Hopkins

If you want something with a bit more edge, start here. The Great Gilly Hopkins follows eleven-year-old Gilly, a sharp, manipulative foster kid who has bounced through too many homes and decided that the only safe strategy is to need nobody. When she is placed with Maime Trotter, a large, unflappable woman with a heart bigger than her house, Gilly meets the one person she cannot outsmart or outrun.

Why This Alternative

Where Bridge to Terabithia shows Paterson at her most heartbreaking, Gilly Hopkins shows her at her funniest and most clear-eyed about how children survive difficult circumstances. Gilly is not a sympathetic heroine at first. She is rude, racist, and convinced she is smarter than every adult in the room. Paterson never softens her, but she does let us see the fear underneath the bravado.

The ending refuses the easy resolution that most children’s books about foster care deliver. Gilly does not get what she wants, and what she gets instead is harder and more honest. It won the National Book Award in 1979 and remains one of the best novels about the foster care system ever written for any age.