The Great Gilly Hopkins

Gilly and her grandmother travel to her grandmother’s home in Virginia. In the car, Gilly is taciturn as she is wishing she was back in Thompson Park. Gilly’s grandmother realizes that Gilly is not happy to be going with her, and she feels bad. Gilly’s new home is nicer and larger than Maime Trotter’s home. Gilly is offered Courtney’s pink, girly bedroom, but she chooses to stay in the bedroom that belonged to her uncle Chadwell who died in the Vietnam War years ago.

Her grandmother’s loneliness soon becomes obvious. Her husband and son both died, and Courtney rarely communicates with her. Gilly compares her grandmother’s chatter to a “long-unused faucet” (134). Gilly tunes her out but behaves politely. She takes out Courtney’s photo that usually stays hidden in her suitcase and puts it on the bureau in her new bedroom, but then puts it back into her suitcase because “the face didn’t fit in this room any more than it had fit in all the others” (135).

This chapter includes letters that Gilly writes and receives from people in Thompson Park. Gilly writes William Ernest fantastical stories about her life in Virginia. She says that her grandmother is wealthy and that her horse is training to enter a race.