The Great Gilly Hopkins was published by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1978, a National Book Award winner and Newbery Honor book. It is one of the most psychologically acute novels about the foster care system ever written for young readers — a book that neither sentimentalizes nor pathologizes its protagonist but presents her with complete honesty.
Galadriel (“Gilly”) Hopkins is eleven, brilliant, angry, and a veteran of multiple foster placements. She has been so disappointed by adults that she has constructed an armor of hostility and contempt — she steals, she manipulates, she is deliberately cruel. Her one sustaining fantasy is that her mother (beautiful, absent Courtney) will someday come and take her away from all this. Everything Gilly does is oriented toward that fantasy, and everyone who offers her real love is rejected because they are not Courtney.
She is placed with Maime Trotter — large, warm, barely educated, and possessed of a capacity for love that is both infinite and unsentimental. Trotter does not try to fix Gilly or explain her behavior; she simply loves her, consistently, without demanding love in return. The household includes William Ernest (a timid younger foster child) and Mr. Randolph (an elderly blind neighbor). Gilly’s campaign to be sent away — to get closer to her mother — succeeds, and the novel’s devastating conclusion shows that getting what you think you want is not the same as getting what you need.
Collecting The Great Gilly Hopkins
First edition (Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1978): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed first edition: $80–$200
- Without jacket: $10–$20