Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Mount Angel Public Library | FICTION WOLFF | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Listening Library Audio Books include outstanding unabridged audio books that complement the Chivers Children's Audio Book range. All Listening Library titles are complete and unabridged, and feature molded library cases similar to Chivers Audio Books.
When LaVaughn was little, the obstacles in her life didn't seem so bad. Now she's fifteen and the obstacles aren't so easy. Big questions separate her from her friends. Her mother is distracted by a new man. School could slip away from her so easily. And the boy who's a miracle in her life acts just as if he's in love with her. Only he's not in love with her...
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 6 Up-LaVaughn has matured since readers met her in Make Lemonade (Holt, 1993). She is now 15 and questions everything, from her faith, her slowly eroding friendship with Myrtle and Annie because of their religious beliefs, her sexuality, and her feelings for an old friend who has reentered her life and has secrets of his own. LaVaughn has one main goal-to go to college and escape the housing projects. Her strong relationship with her mother and the high morals and far-reaching academic goals that the woman has instilled in the teen inspire hope. Several teachers recognize promise in LaVaughn, and she is placed in an after-school program to improve her speech. She is also moved to an advanced biology class. Written in free verse, this first-person narrative is related in a conversational vernacular that tugs readers into the story. As LaVaughn progresses in her Grammar Build-Up class and recognizes the importance of proper speech, the language of the storyteller subtly changes. This uplifting story is a celebration of an educational system that doesn't let a promising student fall through the cracks. It shows that there is something attainable outside the projects, where drugs, gangs, and violence are a constant threat; gives hope to dream of a better life; and demonstrates one young woman's courage to work as hard as one must to achieve that dream.-Kit Vaughan, Midlothian Middle School, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Eight years after the publication of her groundbreaking Make Lemonade, Wolff has surpassed herself with this sequel. LaVaughn once again narrates in blank verse, but turns from Jolly's story (the unwed mother for whom she babysat) to her own. Characters who stood on the periphery in Make Lemonade come to the fore here, especially LaVaughn's mother and LaVaughn's two best friends, Myrtle and Annie. Opening as the heroine embarks on 10th grade, the novel immediately introduces one of the pivotal issues of puberty: "Me and Myrtle & Annie,/ we all want to save our bodies for our right husband/ when he comes along./.../ There is several ways to do this saving." Myrtle and Annie opt for "Cross Your Legs for Jesus," a religious group with a narrowly prescribed outline for getting into heaven. With her characteristic intuition and wisdom, LaVaughn decides against this path ("It seems like a good idea at first./ But it doesn't feel right/ when I think about it"), and thus begins her solo journey to her own idea of faith. Along the way, the protagonist continues working toward college (with the support of her mother and some model teachers), falls in love, makes new friends and finds a vocation. With delicacy and sensitivity, Wolff examines the tensions that grow out of LaVaughn's decision to improve herself while leaving others behind, her choice to forgive in the face of Myrtle and Annie's intolerance, and her ability to trust despite a dangerous world. In delving into LaVaughn's life, Wolff unmasks the secret thoughts adolescents hold sacred and, in so doing, lets her readers know they are not alone. Ages 12-up. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Middle School) Struggling to keep up in her advanced science class and perplexed by her two newly born-again best friends, LaVaughn, now fifteen, finds herself facing a new set of emotions when her childhood friend Jody returns to their dismal inner-city neighborhood: ""He could be in movies, / the way the parts of his face go together."" Virginia Euwer Wolff showed herself to be a master stylist in her first free-verse novel about LaVaughn, Make Lemonade (rev. 11/93); in this sequel she again demonstrates how necessity drives invention, making each line-break fall in exactly the right place, never relying on the bottom of a page to provide a punch line. Wolff allows LaVaughn's teacher to spell out the narrative strategy: ""Nouns name the world. Adjectives qualify it. / Verbs are our meager attempt to record / the vast motion of all life, / prepositions connote the relationships among phenomena."" At once that simple and that complicated, LaVaughn's portrayal of her life at school and home becomes shaped by her feelings for Jody, as she moves from hope (thinking to herself, ""Jody, there is a dance and we could go to it together"") through uncertainty (""What did Patrick mean, 'Then it's not your boyfriend'"") to awful truth (""I recognized Jody but not the other one, / I only noticed it was a boy. / I stood ice-still and I saw their mouths go together and stay""). It's a heartbreaking story, truthful in its pain but buoyed by LaVaughn's resilient spirit and by a redemptive and earned ending. The cast (especially LaVaughn's lab partner, Patrick, and her mother) is richly developed, and occasional appearances by Jolly, the teen mother LaVaughn befriended in Make Lemonade, remind readers that LaVaughn, like Jolly, will manage in the face of changing circumstance. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
When Wolff writes a book, its an event. When she revisits LaVaughn, as she does in True Believer , it is a prodigious gift. This book stands alone, but includes a cameo appearance by the hapless Jolly ( Make Lemonade , 1993). In the course of LaVaughn's seismic 15th year, she grapples with all the big questions of teen life: the drifting away of lifelong friends, setting life goals, falling in love with the wrong man, making sense of sexuality and abstinence, and questioning the existence of God. Or, as LaVaughn puts it, "My life is so swollen with things . . ." With wisdom, snap, and a touch of profound sadness, LaVaughn confronts her best friends' slipping away to "be all the property of Jesus," the deeply wounding discovery that the boy she loves is gay, and the acknowledgment of her own character flaws. She is accused of being "uppity" for her academic achievement, her refusal to join the "Cross your Legs for Jesus Club" and her disdain of a brilliant, shabby lab partner. With every aspect of her life in tatters, LaVaughn confides in her scrappy mother (also an uppity woman) and begins to "rise to the occasion which is life," bringing together the rich cast of characters who inhabit her world at a sweet-16 party. The urban setting, in which six children in LaVaughn's fourth-grade class have died violently, is effectively but unsensationally sketched. In economical blank verse of graceful simplicity, Wolff unerringly reveals the inner depths of her heroine. While LaVaughn feels isolated in her confusion about life, she is surrounded by adults (including demanding, mentoring teachers) who will not allow her to fail. This is a coming-of-age story with both bite and heart, which poses more questions than it answers but never runs out of hope. (Fiction. 12-16)
Booklist Review
Gr. 7^-12. "My heart was so stretching, like a room wanting company," LaVaughn says at the end of Make Lemonade (Booklist's 1993 Top of the List winner for Youth Fiction). In this equally powerful sequel, LaVaughn, now 15, challenges her heart's resilience again when she develops her first deep crush. Other things are going on as well. She drifts apart from her best friends Myrtle and Annie, who join a "Cross Your Legs for Jesus" club; her mother dates for the first time since LaVaughn's father died; and always there is the poverty and violence of the neighborhood, the pressure of school, and her unwavering goal to get to college. Her deepening intellectual excitement is an anchor, but LaVaughn struggles under the confusing new weight of her emotions, particularly when she sees her crush kiss another boy. As in Lemonade, LaVaughn tells her own story in heart-stopping stream-of-consciousness that reveals her convincing naiveteand her blazing determination, intelligence, and growth. Yet the writing style still allows the supporting characters to shine. Transcendent, raw, and fiercely optimistic, the novel answers some of its own questions about overcoming adversity when, in the end, LaVaughn's strength and capacity to love surprise even herself. A natural for reader's theater, this will capture even reluctant readers. --Gillian Engberg