The Great Gilly Hopkins | Setting

The Great Gilly Hopkins Setting

The Great Gilly Hopkins takes place in the 1970s. When the book opens, Gilly Hopkins is on her way to Maime Trotter's, her third foster home in three years. Trotter's potbellied old house—located in Thompson Park, Maryland, a fictional suburb of Washington, D.C.—

resembles its owner. Gilly's snap judgment of the house influences her initial reaction to Trotter. Coming from another foster home that was larger, more efficiently run, and more tastefully decorated, Gilly finds the worn furniture and drab colors depressing.

Later in the story, Gilly is forced to leave Trotter's and is sent to live with her grandmother, Nonnie, in Jackson, Virginia, a rural town west of Washington. Here she rejects her mother's old room because it is too pink and frilly; instead, she chooses a room that once belonged to her mother's brother, a pilot who died in Vietnam. At Nonnie's, too, Gilly confronts...
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