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.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
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BetaChapters 14-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Time with Josie”
The chapter resumes an hour or so after Chapter 13 ends. Josie and Hollis have finished decorating the living room for Christmas, but Josie has started expressing regret that Beatrice isn’t there. To cheer her up, Hollis retrieves her finished portrait of Josie and Beatrice. Josie loves it, noticing her cat Henry in the portrait. In exchange, she gives Hollis a tin of the hard candies Izzy always had, saying “This is from Santa Claus” (139), which means Steven has brought them, though Hollis doesn’t know this. They fill Hollis with memories of the Regans.
Then, Josie retrieves Hollis’s Christmas present, which is the finished wooden statue of Hollis she’s been making. Hollis is overwhelmed by it. When she tries to say it doesn’t look troublesome enough to be her, Josie disagrees and says, “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you” (141). Hollis cries briefly. They rest on the couch, and Josie falls asleep. Soon, Hollis gets up and goes to Steven’s room, where she finds a blurry photograph that he took of her on the river that summer. She remembers how happy she felt when he took it. Feeling confused, she heads outside into the cold.
Thirteenth Picture Summary: “The Conference Room”
Hollis drew this picture at the agency, showing an imaginary girl laughing at the conference table. It’s where Hollis was sitting when the agency people brought in the Old Man to speak to her. Hollis avoids the Old Man’s eyes and apologizes to him for the accident. He says the fault isn’t relevant and that he hopes she’ll come home with him. Hollis feels the desire to do so, but she instead apologizes again and decides internally that if she came home with them “they’d always blame Steven” (146). The Old Man keeps talking, but Hollis stops listening, and when the agency woman returns looking sad, Hollis says “You want tough? […] I’ll show you tough” (146).
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Time with Josie”
This chapter returns to Hollis just after she’s gone out into the snow, feeling tumultuous emotions. She feels like crying and remembers Steven’s voice and Beatrice’s, the latter saying “Drawing is a language. […] You have to learn to speak it” (148). She hears the distant sound of a snowmobile (which she doesn’t know is Steven’s).
Hollis goes back inside and puts all her drawings on the bed. She can see clearly in them how happy she was in the summer. They also show her that Josie’s true element is back at home near her ocean, and Hollis realizes she must call Beatrice and get her help bringing Josie home. Hollis also knows this means she’ll have to go to another foster home, a fact she sadly accepts.
Hollis starts to look through the drawings of her time with the Regans. She begins to see things she never noticed before. In many of them, she can see the genuine love between Steven and the Old Man. Hollis remembers Beatrice telling her that your drawings can teach you things, and has sudden clarity that she wasn’t responsible for driving a wedge between Steven and his father after all. Then, she looks at a picture of herself with Izzy’s hard candy in her mouth and begins to put together all the clues that Steven has been Josie’s “Santa Claus” all along. In the last moment of the chapter, she runs to wake up Josie to question her about Santa.
Chapters 14-15 Analysis
Josie’s excitement at discovering Henry, her cat, in the portrait of herself and Beatrice foreshadows the importance of looking closely at pictures, which is about to play a pivotal role in the plot. Hollis continues this when she goes to Steven’s room and picks up the blurry photo on his desk. She had briefly looked at it earlier and not recognized herself in it, but this time she remembers exactly when it was taken and the pleasure it gave her. Hollis is starting to open her eyes and see more deeply into pictures, setting her up for the revelations of Chapter 15.
The drawing in the conference room represents how badly Hollis is cut off from her true self: she is no longer being sincere in her art. The agency employees believe she has drawn a portrait of herself laughing at the conference table, but this is the opposite of what she is really feeling. In a novel that so strongly emphasizes the importance of using art to see the truth, the faked portrait is a way of demonstrating that Hollis has made the wrong decision by distancing herself from the Regans. She is not able to see things as they are, nor is she able to express herself truthfully for the time being.
The conference room is one of the few moments in the novel that isn’t in a natural setting, suggesting that Hollis finds comfort in nature and feels out of place in a structured environment (conference rooms, school, etc.). Whether it be near the sea with Josie or near the mountains with Regan, natural settings symbolize happiness for Hollis, further portrayed when she dreams of living on a mountain as a child.
