Thirteen-year-old Galadriel Hopkins, better known as Gilly, carries her most prized possession, a picture of her mother, to three different foster homes in three years. By the time she reaches the fourth, she already knows what her new foster mom tells her plainly: "Life ain't supposed to be nothing, "cept maybe tough." Racist and judgmental, Gilly sees only that her foster mom is fat, her kid brother is wimpy, and their neighbor is African American, blind and old. A master at twisting lies and scheming to her advantage, Gilly hatches her most elaborate plan yet in her quest to stop being a foster child, When her plan backfires, she learns not only what it means to love but "what it means to have people and then lose them."

Eleven-year-old Gilly has been stuck in more foster families than she can remember, and she's disliked them all. She has a county-wide reputation for being brash, brilliant, and completely unmanageable. So when she's sent to live with the Trotters -- by far the strangest family yet -- Gilly decides to put her sharp mind to work. Before long she's devised an elaborate scheme to get her real mother to come rescue her.

But the rescue doesn't work out, and the great Gilly Hopkins is left thinking that maybe life with the Trotters wasn't so bad ...