Make Lemonade

How can a 14-year-old babysitter make up for the parents, the husband, the whole support system that 17-year-old single mother Jolly needs--and doesn't have? LaVaughn is every bit as determined to help the struggling ghetto family she babysits for as she is to save money for college. This is the first in Euwer Wolf's LaVaughn trilogy. Her second, TRUE BELIEVER, won Newbery honors this year. LaVaughn is a girl worth following, a girl whose observations are full of humor and honesty. Narrator Heather Alicia Simms captures the ghetto cadences that put listeners right in the middle of Jolly's cockroach-infested living room. When Simms draws out LaVaughn's name to emphasize Jolly's anger, it's like overhearing girls talking on a corner--very real and in the moment. M.C. 2003 YALSA Selection (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

May 17, 1993
Poetry is everywhere, as Wolff ( The Mozart Season ) proves by fashioning her novel with meltingly lyric blank verse in the voice of an inner-city 14-year-old. As LaVaughn tells it, ``This word COLLEGE is in my house, / and you have to walk around it in the rooms / like furniture.'' A paying job will be her ticket out of the housing projects, so she agrees to baby-sit the two children of unwed Jolly, 17, in an apartment so wretched ``even the roaches are driven up the wall.'' Jolly is fired from her factory job and her already dire situation gets worse. Through her ``Steam'' (aka self-esteem) class, LaVaughn decides that it isn't honorable to use Jolly's money to prevent herself becoming like Jolly, so she watches the kids for free while Jolly looks for work. But there are few opportunities for a nearly illiterate dropout, and LaVaughn sees that her unpaid baby-sitting is a form of welfare. Heeding her mother, LaVaughn decides that the older girl has to ``take hold.'' She prods Jolly to go back to school, where the skills she learns not only change her life but save that of her baby. Radiant with hope, this keenly observed and poignant novel is a stellar addition to YA literature. Ages 11-14.