And I thought I would be furious. I thought Gilly Hopkins was going to be a funny book. I meant for it to be a funny book, and then it just got weird on me. Of course, it's read by all manner of children, and the children who have a fairly safe environment and who love their homes are just furious that she doesn't get to go back to Trotter. But the children who have had a very hard life say, That's not the way it is.
Anger is the basic thing going here.
And, yes, I think it's shocking. I want her behavior to be so bad that nobody can excuse it, because you can't perceive her as truly a troubled child unless she does something that shocks you. And the character thinks that she can do something that's really very malicious by using that word. I remember one woman just going at me, and she said, What did your father think of such a book, knowing that my father was a very conservative Presbyterian. The Great Gilly Hopkins is his favorite, but then he's read the story of the prodigal son.