Parenthetical

During the school year, I mostly read for work: how will I know what to give my kids if I don’t tear through as many YA novels as possible? Consequently, I almost never read sequels; I got enough of a taste with the first book, so I feel guilty if I linger. This summer’s reading project is to catch up on the sequels to some books I loved.

TOS is the sequel to Dairy Queen, another book in the “I adored it and so did my kids” category. In DQ, DJ Schwenk is annoyed when well-off Brian Nelson, star quarterback on the rival town’s football team, starts hanging around her family’s struggling dairy farm. His coach decided that spending some time with the Schwenks would give Brian a “work ethic,” but DJ already has plenty of ethic and the work to match. She reluctantly agrees to train Brian, and discovers that she loves football even more than she thought she did. Not only that, she’s a pretty good player… good enough to play for her school’s team.

In DQ, the problems are mostly DJ’s own: she’s overloaded with work, she’s not sure how she feels about Brian, and of course, she’s the only female football player in the state of Wisconsin. Her family’s problems are hinted at, but never fully explored. In TOS, those problems take center stage: DJ’s best friend Amber is tormented at school for dating a woman, DJ’s mom throws her back out and can’t work, and the farm is losing a frightening amount of money. Then there are DJ’s own problems: Brian might be her boyfriend, except that he doesn’t seem to want to be seen with her in public, and she has an accident that forces her to choose between playing football and the possibility of a basketball scholarship.

One of DJ’s defining character traits is her ineloquence. She’s a great athlete, but when she has to talk her way through a difficult situation, she gets stuck. It’s unusual, I think, to find a realistic YA character like this (probably because most authors are eloquent, by definition), but both DQ and TOS manage to be written in DJ’s not-a-strong-student tone without making her seem stupid or weighing the book down. I love this passage, on the subject of Doing Something Stupid (as her mom calls it) with Brian:

I hadn’t really been alone with Brian — not counting the barn, which I don’t because Dad’s there all the time and also the straw is super itchy — since the Mall of America, and while I hadn’t Done Anything Stupid, I wasn’t sure where exactly I stood on the whole subject. I mean, it’s not that I wanted to do anything Really Stupid, but I wouldn’t be so against doing something Kind of Stupid — something A Little Silly, maybe. Not that I had any clear ideas, but I couldn’t help but wonder. So it was awfully hard to work on algebra, and when I took out my A&P book, I looked through the chapter on reproduction, the pages all grimy from kids before me, and that didn’t help much either.

DJ finding her voice and her strength is a theme of this book, even more so than it was in DQ. And she does, in ways that will make you cheer — even if (like me) you wanted the happy ending that wouldn’t actually be best for the character.

(Sidebar about the farm: if you know me, you know that sustainable food is one of my favorite subjects. A book with a small farm struggling to stay afloat in the days of Big Agribusiness? Bring on the Positive Messages! But Murdock doesn’t, exactly. She walks a careful tightrope between ignoring the troubles of small farms entirely, and beating us over the head with Thou Shalt Buy Local. As evangelistic as I am, I have to respect that. This is as much as DJ ever says on the subject, when she’s considering her dad’s ideas about going organic:

On the other hand, what good had not using chemicals done us so far? It’s not like people come by our place because Schwenk milk tastes so great, or that we have any way of even telling them how great it tastes. People I know wouldn’t pay more for that, not one penny, not for just milk. Maybe city folks would… But it still didn’t make sense to me, a bunch of city people who couldn’t identify the front end of a cow paying more for milk that came from sunshine and grass instead of chemicals. That’s not how people think.

Sure, Dad was trying. But it would end up being another one of his harebrained ideas…. And the farm would keep losing money, and eventually he’d have to sell to a developer and give up all his cows and farming ways, which would just about destroy him, and me too, I have to say, and that would be the end of the Schwenks. All because people don’t really care what goes in their mouths as long as it doesn’t come out of their wallets.

By the end of the book, the problem — realistically, and along with most of DJ’s larger problems — goes unsolved.)

Read-alikes: Definitely read DQ first, though in some ways this is an even better book. But my main read-alike recommendation is actually a watch-alike: the TV show Friday Night Lights, whose second season E and I are in the middle of on DVD. It and Murdock’s books made me care (just a tiny bit, mind you) about football, and if that isn’t high praise, I don’t know what is.