The Great Gilly Hopkins

Katherine Paterson's The Great Gilly Hopkins is a sharp and rather sad story for 10 year olds about a girl who has decided that being awful is safer than being loved.

What happens

Galadriel Hopkins is eleven and on her way to her third foster home in under three years.

In the car she blows bubble gum until she can't see the back of the social worker's head, then sticks the chewed lump under the door handle for whoever opens it next. She won't comb her hair. She's going for a world record, she says.

She calls herself Gruesome Gilly, and she's proud of it.

The new house is dusty and dark and full of junk. Maime Trotter is enormous and cheerful and completely unbothered by anything Gilly throws at her. There's a small boy called William Ernest who hides behind Trotter's skirt, and a blind neighbour, Mr Randolph, who comes round for supper every night.

Gilly hates all of it. She's already planning how to get rid of them.

And under all that there's a photograph at the bottom of her suitcase. A beautiful woman with dark waves in her hair and, written in the corner, "For my beautiful Galadriel, I will always love you." Gilly takes it out, looks at it, feels something rising in her throat and shoves it under a T-shirt before it can get out.

That's the book. Being inside a head that is funny and vicious and absolutely terrified at the same time.

Now the part you'll want to know about first. Gilly is racist, and the book puts it on the page. She refuses to touch Mr Randolph because of the colour of his skin. She uses an old, ugly word about William Ernest. She imagines her mother would be furious to hear who they eat supper with.

Paterson is showing you Gilly's armour rather than agreeing with her, and Trotter pulls her up on it within an hour of her arriving. But a child reading alone will meet those words with nobody to talk to about them. If you've got a reader who'd benefit from reading it alongside you, this is one of those.

It was written in 1978, and it sounds it. There's swearing, and the whole world of it is grown-up and grubby in a way that suits a confident reader rather than a new one.

What to read next

If your child wants more Katherine Paterson afterwards, there is Bridge to Terabithia. Jess has spent the whole summer training to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade, and then a new girl moves in next door and beats him.