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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BetaEleventh Picture-Twelfth PictureChapter Summaries & Analyses
Eleventh Picture Summary: “On the Mountain”
Hollis begins the chapter by noting she never drew this day, but the pictures keep coming back in her mind. Izzy and the Old Man have gone out town for the day. Steven asks Hollis to join him on an all-day fishing trip, but she declines, as she secretly plans to hike up the mountain on her own. Hollis starts the walk once Steven has left. It’s a hard climb, just as muddy as the Old Man said it would be, and Hollis twists her ankle. The view at the top is magnificent. Hollis yells into the solitude to mark this new part of her life: “I’m new. […] I’m different” (121). In her haze of joy, Hollis suddenly trips and falls off the cliff she’s standing on, cutting her head, but a boulder stops her before she can fall too far. She’s okay, but she realizes she isn’t going to make it back home alone.
Hours pass. Hollis starts to call out for Steven, even though he’s too far away to hear, but luckily, he soon arrives in the pickup truck. He had returned early from his fishing trip and guessed where she’d gone. As they watch the sunset together, Hollis pulls the magazine picture of the family from the very first scene in the novel out of her backpack. She explains the assignment was to find “W” words, and he immediately says, “It’s a wishing picture, […] for a family” (123). Hollis starts to tell Steven about all the times people have told her she was bad. Steven holds her hand and says she’s in the right place now. For the first time, Hollis feels someone has seen her and accepted her.
They start back down the mountain in the pickup truck. The road is too muddy, and even though Steven turns out to be a good driver, he can’t control the truck, and they flip over the side of the road. The chapter ends with Steven yelling at Hollis to jump.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Time with Josie”
This chapter begins exactly where Chapter 12 ends: with Hollis finishing up her portrait of Josie during the blizzard. The snow stops, and Hollis goes outside to cut down branches for their Christmas decorations. She approaches the shed for a saw and finds one of Steven’s sweaters hanging on the door and assumes she must have left it there (though Steven left it himself). Hollis finishes the hard work of cutting branches in the snow and goes inside. Josie reveals some powdered milk (which Hollis assumes she has found in a cupboard, but which is actually a gift from Steven), and they have a big Christmas dinner of pancakes.
The next morning, Hollis wakes up with a slight feeling of unease, trying to remember “something about the shed” (130). Though she doesn’t know it consciously, Hollis is starting to sense the pattern of things Steven has changed. Hollis and Josie decorate the house with the Christmas ornaments they brought along. A pack of deer run across the yard, and Hollis wonders what disturbed them. She thinks of the person across the river when she was fishing and realizes she didn’t leave Steven’s sweater on the shed door. As the chapter ends, Hollis isn’t sure she wants to know who moved it, “thinking of the fisherman finding us and what might happen then” (132).
Twelfth Picture Summary: “A Mountain of Trouble”
Hollis remembers trying to sleep the night after her car accident on the mountain with Steven. She keeps reliving the sounds and feelings. She remembers that, after the car stopped falling, she turned to Steven and found that he wasn’t dead, but badly injured. Hollis gets out of the truck and hurries to find help. She luckily encounters the Old Man and Izzy driving home. They immediately see she is hurt, and the Old Man says, “What has he done?” (135).
Emergency vehicles arrive. Emergency workers pull Steven out of the car and take him the hospital, where Hollis they bandage Hollis. Izzy takes Hollis home to rest and heads straight back to Steven’s hospital bedside. Alone, Hollis decides that it is all her fault, both the accident and Steven fighting with the Old Man all summer. She packs her bag, leaves a note saying she doesn’t want them to adopt her anymore, and runs away to the stucco woman’s house. She tries to take a picture of the house in her mind’s eye as she leaves.
Shortly afterward, a woman from the agency visits Hollis with the stucco woman and tells her Steven is recovering. Hollis says she doesn’t want to see the Regans again, and they let her stay where she is. At the end of the section, Hollis notes she didn’t remain with the stucco woman more than a month before running away again.
Eleventh Picture-Twelfth Picture Analysis
Just as Hollis has feared, the moment things feel most right is when everything goes terribly wrong. On the mountain, she is emotionally vulnerable with Steven, showing him the W picture and telling him about her checkered past, and he understands it all without question. His selflessness is immediately rewarded by severe injury, fulfilling the dread Hollis has felt throughout the book. The timing of the car accident sends her back into the somewhat superstitious belief that sharing her soul with others will never be safe. She begins to think that being a part of the Regan family is the cause of the negative occurrences, like Steven’s accident and the fights between Steven and the Old Man.
Uniquely, the 12th picture doesn’t start with any reference to a drawing. It depicts Hollis’s traumatic memory as she re-experiences the sights, sounds, and sensations of the accident. Drawings allow Hollis to be slightly outside her experiences, analyzing and adding to them, so the choice to begin the chapter without a picture shows that Hollis is still fully inside the experience of the accident, unable to separate herself from it. Later in the section, she references taking a picture in her head of the Branches house just before running away. She doesn’t draw the picture, in part because she leaves her drawing set behind; it also symbolizes her sense that she has lost herself, since drawing has always given Hollis identity, and she feels she is leaving a major part of that behind her in Branches.
It’s significant that she runs back to the stucco woman who mistreated her, as the choice suggests she shares the low opinion of herself that the stucco woman expressed; she’s a “mountain of trouble.” The scene from before, where she looks at her reflection and likes what she sees, implies that Hollis’s confidence is growing as she remains with Josie, though the stress of caring for an adult as a child is clearly distressing. She also worries that Josie is unhappy without Beatrice and that someone will discover the pair. There are a multitude of problems heaped on the 11-year-old’s shoulders leading into the novel’s climax.
