Hope Was Here (2000) by Joan Bauer tells the story of Hope Yancey, a witty and optimistic 16-year-old coping with the complexities of growing up amid financial difficulty, social upheaval, and change in her family. Hope has been raised by her Aunt Addie after her mother surrendered custody of her at birth. As Hope and Addie traverse the country chasing jobs and running diners, Hope grapples with her identity and figuring out where to call home. The novel was named a Newbery Honor Book and named runner-up for the Newbery Medal in 2001. It was also named an ALA Notable Book and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and won the Young Reader’s Choice Award in 2003. The audiobook, narrated by Jenna Lamia, won the AudioFile Earphones Award.

The source material for this guide comes from the 2000 edition by Putnam.

Plot Summary

Hope Yancey is a 16-year-old living in Brooklyn, New York, with her Aunt Addie, her legal guardian and the manager of the local Blue Box diner, where they both work. After Gleason Beal, Addie’s business partner at the diner, steals the diner’s money and runs off, Hope and Addie pack their car and move to Mulhoney, Wisconsin, in search of other opportunities.

Hope and Addie have moved around a lot, and each time they leave a place, Hope scrawls the phrase “HOPE WAS HERE” in the diner as a way of saying goodbye. When Addie and Hope arrive in the small town of Mulhoney, they visit the Welcome Stairways diner, their new place of employment. They meet G.T. Stoop, the diner owner, a gregarious man who remains cheerful despite running a restaurant while battling leukemia. Addie wastes no time evaluating the menu and planning how she can add her signature recipes. Hope catches a glimpse of Braverman, a tall, ruggedly handsome line cook. Hope desperately misses all the friends she left behind in Brooklyn and worries about assimilating into the small town, but she has little time to think before Memorial Day weekend crowds flood the diner and she settles into waitressing, using the skills she learned from her mother, Deena.

Hope maintains a strained relationship with Deena, who originally named her Tulip. Hope changed her name when she was 12 and only sees her biological mother every few years. Though her mother’s emotional and physical distance angers Hope, the lack of a father figure gives her the most grief. Every year, Hope carefully curates a scrapbook of all the major events of her life in the hope of one day meeting her biological father and sharing her life with him. Along with her treasured thesaurus, dictionary, and world globe, Hope carries the scrapbooks with her each time they move to a new city, pinpointing her location on the globe and talking to her phantom father, telling him where she lives and revealing her greatest anxieties and fears.

Shortly after Addie and Hope arrive, G.T. announces he is running for mayor against incumbent Eli Millstone, who is rumored to take bribes from the mega-corporation Real Fresh Dairy in exchange for turning a blind eye to the dairy’s unpaid taxes. Once G.T. announces his candidacy, the townsfolk doubt he is healthy enough to serve, and Millstone’s campaign members begin stalking the diner and anyone affiliated with the Stoop campaign.

After a groundswell of support from local teenagers including Braverman and Hope, G.T. gets the required number of signatures to get his name on the ballot. Millstone’s associates intensify their efforts to intimidate G.T.’s supporters using theft and physical attacks. Millstone’s dirty tactics only serve to embolden G.T.’s supporters, and by election day, the two opponents are neck and neck in the polls. However, after Millstone circulates a rumor that G.T.’s cancer has returned to his brain, G.T. loses by 114 votes. Hope later learns that the votes were fraudulent, and the town demands the truth from Real Fresh Dairy and the Millstone campaign. The Real Fresh owner, the town sheriff, and Millstone are all implicated in election fraud, and G.T., whose cancer is in remission, is elected mayor. He proposes to Addie, and after their honeymoon, he asks to adopt Hope as his daughter. Hope shares her scrapbooks with G.T., and he grafts a limb from one tree to another to create a new tree symbolizing their family. Hope and Braverman have their first date, which ends with a kiss, and Hope feels, for the first time, that her life is going in the right direction.

G.T. carries out his promises to inspire the townspeople to serve those in need. By the end of Hope’s senior year, she prepares to leave for college but also grieves as G.T.’s cancer has returned with a vengeance. She spends as much time with him as she can before he passes away and is thankful to have had a real father even for just a short time.