the N-word, which has landed Paterson’s novel on numer-
ous banned-book lists.
I choked over that word myself, reading it to my mixed-
race daughter. I winced at the scenes in which Gilly’s
birth mother doesn’t seem interested in parenting.
Most of us don’t consider the lives of the more than
400,000 foster children in the United States. We don’t
have to. They’re a mostly hidden demographic, yet they
exist in plain sight at school, in the library, on playgrounds.
Decades ago, my mother gave me a paperback copy of
The Pinballs. Written by Betsy Byars, it’s the story of
three kids stuck in a home with career foster parents
who get them to trust again. I knew, after I’d read the
book until the cover fell off, that I wanted to grow up
and adopt a child.
My husband and I took the required parenting classes,
pored over the Department of Human Services’ enormous
binder of children available for adoption, and found
ourselves the parents of a round-faced toddler with merry
brown eyes and a wide, mischievous smile.
But by first grade, that smile had faded, and her eyes
had grown watchful and wary. Weekly meetings with
her therapist turned into sullen, taciturn hours that
exhausted everyone.
Did I honestly think story time could help?
I did. Over the past decade, numerous studies have
shown a correlation between reading literary fiction and
developing an increased capacity for empathy. Research-
ers have used R.J. Palacio’s Wonder and J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter series to show that reading about diverse
protagonists expands our compassion for their real-life
counterparts.
The Great Gilly Hopkins is a wonderfully comedic
novel despite its grim subject matter. The characters are
funny and idiosyncratic. I developed a voice for each,
and my daughter sat wide-eyed on the couch, soaking
up my attempts at theater. But Gilly I played straight.
Paterson shows that below the girl’s bullying, racist exte-
rior, she’s raw with pain.
“She’s sad,” my daughter told me one morning. “She
doesn’t understand why her mother doesn’t want her.”
Again, I cringed. My husband and I had always been
candid with our daughter about her adoption story. Still,
I wondered if Gilly’s struggles brought back memories
of my child’s experiences in foster care.
I needn’t have worried. The book continued to capti-
vate, giving her the language to own her story without
embarrassment or shame. “My birth mother couldn’t keep
me, so I went to a foster home,” she told kids at danceABOUT THE
AUTHOR
Melissa Hart is the
author of Better with
Books: 500 Diverse
Books to Ignite Empa-
thy and Encourage
Self-Acceptance in
Tweens and Teens
and the preteen novel
Avenging the Owl.
She lives with her
husband and daugh-
ter in Oregon.and art classes. “My parents found me there. They gave
me a brownie and a cat named Eeyore.” She stopped
chewing her T-shirts and knotting her hair. She demanded
I read the last third of the book in one sitting.PATERSON’S ENDING ISN’T happy—not at all ideal for
readers like my daughter and me, who grew to care
intensely about the anguished little girl. Gilly ends up
with her genteel maternal grandmother—a stranger to
her—and has to leave the foster mother with whom she’s
formed a deep bond. When I read the final sentence, my
child sat stone-faced with our terrier clutched in her
arms. She picked up a volume of Garfield comics and
began reading.
“You might write to Katherine Paterson,” I suggested.
“Tell her what you think of her book.”
“I don’t want to,” she muttered.
But later, she sat at her desk with her head bent over
a piece of paper and her fingers curled around a pen.
She wrote for an hour, laboriously, and folded the paper
and put it in an envelope.
“Please, Mumsie,” she said. “Will you send this to the
author?”
“I will,” I said, and went for a stamp.
Later, in the post office, I unfolded the letter. In curli-
cue letters, she’d written:Dear Katherine P.,
I read your book the Great Gilly Hopkins.
I love it. It had so many details.
I am 9, I also was a foster girl!
I was moved two times.
I was adopted at the age 19 months.
P.S. PLEASE write book 2 of Gilly Hopkins.This novel began a transformation, a way
for my daughter to understand and feel empa-
thy for her own story. A year later, she returned
to a colorful and nurturing classroom. Now
she runs happily up the steps to her middle
school each morning.
My neighbor has moved. It’s my role now
to study the kids on our street and stock our
Little Free Library.
“This one, Mom,” my daughter says. She
hands me one of her beloved picture books
for the toddler who stays with her grandmother down
the street. This one for the second grader with a speechCOURTESY OF JONATHAN B. SM impairment. “And this one, and this one,” she says.