68 pages • 2 hours read
Patricia Reilly GiffPictures Of Hollis Woods
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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The Lasting Effects of Trauma and Memories
The structure and writing style in this novel mirror the interior world of a child who has lived through traumatic experiences. Hollis is an orphan, abandoned by unknown parents immediately after she was born. She has spent her whole life in the foster care system and has never found a permanent home. Though we never hear Hollis describe any incidents that are overtly abusive, experts have found that the experience of repeated abandonment has a profound and traumatic effect on young people, even when it happens in infancy. It can cause children to act out, much as Hollis does by skipping school and talking back. Another classic symptom of trauma is the intrusion of memories on your daily life, taking you back to previous bad experiences.
While there is no way for the reader to know whether Hollis has post-traumatic stress disorder, it is certainly the case that Hollis is haunted by her memories. The present-tense action in the novel is often interrupted by Hollis flashing back to a previous experience or to the voice, remembered or imagined, of someone she’s known. It’s also one reason the novel is divided into “chapters” and “pictures,” the latter of which usually take place in the past. These stylistic choices mean the reader joins Hollis in living in two worlds, constantly shifting between what’s happening now and what happened before.
Because Hollis feels that the present—even if it’s going well—can always be derailed by the return of a bad experience, she spends most of the novel unable to fully trust that anything good will stay. When the Regans announce they want to adopt her and seem unanimously delighted by the prospect, she’s worried that her presence will tear the family apart. She takes the car accident as evidence she was right and refuses to listen to the Old Man when he says that’s not true. Hollis’s life experiences have always taught her that she’s trouble and that no one wants her, and that trauma makes it almost impossible for her to believe anything else.
As the plot reaches its resolution, the action in later chapters remains more and more in the present. Hollis’s memories stop interrupting the action, as she learns that the fighting between Steven and the Old Man is an extension of their love and begins to hope that Steven has been watching over her and Josie at the Branches house. The more Hollis believes she is truly loved and wanted, the more she is able to lay her traumatic memories to rest. The novel’s final section is the only “picture” not set in the past—instead, it is set in a hopeful future in which Hollis is truly and permanently part of a family. That stylistic choice shows how much Hollis has been able to heal and how she can now move forward, rather than backward, in time.
Running, Hiding, and Being Found
Because of all she’s been through in the foster system, Hollis has learned to take control of her situation by running away and hiding her true self. A key piece of her character development is learning that it’s safe to let herself be found. Her abandonment in Holliswood as a newborn calls to mind archetypal stories of other lost children, like Peter Pan or the infant Moses, who are orphans left at the mercy of nature. She takes her name from that place, symbolically marking her with an unknown parent’s original act of running and hiding. The hiddenness that defines Holliswood extends to the fact that Hollis is never able to find the trees after which she assumes the neighborhood was named, though she tries to locate them in Queens at some point before the action of the novel. Her origins are hidden from her, and Hollis continues the cycle by keeping herself hidden from others.
At the start of the novel, Hollis’s acts of running and hiding define her. In the first scene, at only six years old, she walks out of school when she punished after the W picture incident. Her very young age makes this an audacious act and shows how early on she learned this coping strategy. We also learn that, even when Hollis isn’t actually running, she finds ways to hide from adults she doesn’t trust. In the first chapter, when the mustard woman is dropping her off at Josie’s for the first time, Hollis uses her clothes and posture to hide herself in the car. She says she doesn’t want anyone to look into her eyes so they won’t see her soul, which provides deeper insight into why she hides: it’s not just about avoiding frustrating situations, but about protecting her sensitive inner self from all the adults who misunderstand her or tell her she’s bad.
Hollis’s major character development begins when others start to truly see her, showing that she is found at last. This is symbolized by Josie’s creation of a tree branch portrait of Hollis, which overwhelms Hollis because it doesn’t depict her as being “trouble” as she’s always believed herself to be. It also shows up in all her relationships with all the Regans, who each see a different need in her. In scenes with Steven and the Old Man in particular, Hollis is described as looking them straight in the eye. The direct contrast with her earlier statement that she avoids eye contact means her willingness to show her soul is increasing.
In both of the story timelines, Hollis chooses to run away from the major conflict (the car accident in the Regan timeline and her impending re-homing in the Josie timeline), indicating that, though she is growing emotionally, her knee-jerk response to bad feelings is still to hide. Consequently, the novel’s resolution relies on Steven finding her at the Branches house. Steven’s sixth sense for knowing where Hollis will be crops up throughout the novel—he finds her on the mountaintop as well, and whenever she wills him to appear, he always does. The Regans’s love is so transformative that it overcomes her attempts to hide. It proves to her that this act which has defined her life is no longer necessary, and when she takes the Regans’s last name in the final section, she can truly move on from being exclusively identified with the site of her abandonment.
Using Art to See Life Clearly
The opening moments of the novel describe Hollis using artistic expression to make sense of her life and her needs. In submitting the picture of the family as her homework assignment, she takes a creative approach to finding W words and her teacher firmly rejects her. Nonetheless, pictures remain a vital part of how she processes the world. This is literalized for the reader because of the novel’s division into “pictures” and “chapters.” With just a couple of exceptions, each “picture” is organized around one of Hollis’s drawings of a key moment in her life. The picture sections begin and/or end by describing the drawing, including what colors Hollis used, who or what is in the composition, and the feeling she was trying to convey. The drawings are Hollis’s window into her own life, and they become the reader’s window as well, anchoring the narrative in the visual. An image defines each major relationship or incident in Hollis’s life.
Hollis’s identity is wrapped up in her artistic ability. In the novel’s opening section, when she runs away from school at the age of six and is punished by a foster mother, Hollis scoffs, “That foolish woman forgot that as long as I had pencil and paper, I’d get along” (2-3) and proceeds to throw gravel at a portrait she’s drawn of the woman. Hollis’s foster life means she has little to call her own, but this passage indicates that art is all she really needs to survive. When she spends the rest of the story compulsively drawing, it is not just as a distraction, but as a survival tool.
Drawings drive the plot in this novel as Hollis’s understanding of how to find deeper meaning in her own art deepens. Initially, she treats her drawings more like expressions of the moment, and we rarely see her looking at her own art. The first time she brings out all her drawings in one place is when Beatrice requests them, refusing to eat the Chinese food she’s brought until she has inspected every one with her art teacher’s eye. Beatrice makes a point of telling Hollis she has an unusual artistic gift, and delivers the novel’s central lesson by telling Hollis that “you have to keep looking to find the truth” (45), even in your own art; and that “you, the artist, can’t hide from the world, because you’re putting yourself down there too” (45). She echoes something the Old Man had previously told Hollis, and the fact that two trusted adults see Hollis’s art so clearly grants her a new self-confidence.
The real gift Beatrice and the Old Man give Hollis is the insight that her drawings will contain truths that she cannot yet see herself. The novel’s resolution is only possible because Hollis spreads out all her drawings (echoing the scene with Beatrice) and looks for clues in them, which immediately lets her see what has been muddled before (that Josie needs to live at home, that the Old Man and Steven love one another, and that Steven has been “Santa Claus” all along). Art is not only a survival tool for Hollis, but almost like a superpower that allows her to unlock secrets.
