W is for a Wonderful Read

Hollis Woods is a brilliant, talented, eleven year old artist. Abandoned on a street, naked with only a note, asking that she be named Hollis Woods, she has been shuttled between foster homes. She thinks of her various homes in terms of what they look like from the outside, stucco, green, brick, shutters, etc. rather than what kind of people are on the inside. Hollis has the tendency to run away, one morning she will wake up, and she feels like she's had enough of the home she's lived in, and she knows the people she's lived with have had enough of her too.
Hollis' life can be summed up in one experience, when she was six, her teacher asked her to bring to school a picture that started with the letter 'W'. Hollis brought in a picture of a family. Her teacher placed a large X across it, because she could find nothing that started with W in the picture. But Hollis could find 'wish' amd 'want'.
Hollis is placed with a kindly, but elderly art teacher named Josie Cahill, who lives with her prickly cat named Henry. While this seems like a perfect placement for Hollis, and in some ways it is, Hollis can't seem to forget the time that she almost had her perfect "W" picture.
The summer before she had lived with a family that had loved and accepted her for herself. John, Izzy and Steven were ready to adopt Hollis at the end of the summer until an accident happened, and Hollis ran away. But Hollis can't get the thought out of her mind that things could have been different and she could have been part of a real family.
When her situation with Josie is threatened by Josie's increasing forgetfulness, Hollis has to make some painful decisions. The climax while it strains my adult levels of believability, makes a wonderful story for the age 10-13 that is was written for. Told in a series of present tense and flash backs, "Pictures of Hollis Woods", provides and interesting style of writing for preadolescents to be exposed to.