Gooney Bird Greene is the protagonist of her self-titled story. She arrives part-way through the school year adorned in unique dress and confident in who she is. Gooney Bird’s unique style of dress changes with the days and matches each story that she tells. Her fashion sense is one way she demonstrates her uniqueness and confidence to the world. Gooney Bird is articulate and knowledgeable for her age; she’s well versed in the process and attributes of What Makes a Great Story. She shows off this skill during a week in which each day she tells her class one story of her life before she moved to Watertower. Gooney Bird’s stories are always introduced with some hint of what is to follow and often a misleading word or two to entice listeners and create twists in her narratives. For instance, Gooney Bird says she came from China on a flying carpet, but it turns out that she came from a city named China in the United States. The flying carpet was a figure of speech used to describe an incident where she and her cat fell out of the car while rolled up inside a carpet.