Eleven-year-old Gilly has been stuck in more foster families than she can remember, and she's disliked them all intensely. She has a county-wide reputation for being brash, brilliant, and completely unmangable.

So when she's sent to live with the Trotters--by far the strangest family yet--Gilly decides to put her brilliant mind to work. Before long she's devised an elaborate scheme to get her real mother to come "rescue" her.

But the rescue doens't work out quite the way she planned. And when the time comes for her to go, the great Gilly Hopkins is left thinking that maybe life with the Trotters wasn't so bad after all....