Let me introduce my friend Judy...

I believe it was a long, boring summer day that I first picked up the classic story Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. The copy we had at my house was an ancient one that my mother had had as a girl (no offense, mom) and it felt like buried treasure to me. As I devoured the letters of the fictional Jerusha Abbott, I felt like I was the first person on earth to discover it.

"Judy" Abbott has been a life-long friend since then. She's one of my best literary friends.

Daddy-Long-Legs is about an orphan named Jerusha "Judy" Abbott living in New York in the early 1900s. She's lived all her life at the John Grier Home and now that she's 18, typically she would be on her own, but something miraculous happens. One of the rich trustees of the orphanage sees promise in her writing and wishes to send her to college to become a writer. He has a few requests: he is to remain completely anonymous and she is to write monthly letters to him updating him on her progress. Jerusha knows him only as "Mr. John Smith".

The bulk of the novel is comprised of these letters and we see scrawny Jerusha Abbott, used to being a pitied orphan at her high school, grow into a young lady who calls herself Judy, who attends classes, makes friends, and writes and writes and writes.

I read this book many times as a child and I recently listened to the audiobook on a car trip. Kate Forbes provides excellent narration and the story took me straight back to those lazy summer days when I curled up on the couch with my friend Judy. I also picked up on things that went over my head when I read it as a kid. There's an element of romance that's way more blatant than I remember it being (or maybe that's just because now I know the ending...).

Um, how did I not know there was a sequel?? You can bet that I'm going to go straight out and find it.

Pair this book with A Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly for tales of scrappy literary-minded women determined to educate themselves in the early 1900s. It's too bad I can't introduce Judy and Mattie - I think they might be good friends. ;)

Book Review: This Full House

This Full House by Virginia Euwer Wolff. (Grades 9+)

LaVaughn dreams of escaping her poor, inner-city neighborhood and going to college to become a doctor. It's a dream she's been working towards since she was 14 and she answered an ad for a babysitter to save up money for college. When she answered that ad, she met teen mom Jolly and her two young kids and LaVaughn's life changed forever.

Now LaVaughn is a senior in high school and her goal is coming ever closer. She's been attending a Summer Science program and now she's accepted into a Women in the Medical Sciences group. LaVaughn knows that it's her ticket to good recommendations, to knowledge, to college. But when her LaVaughn discovers something about her teacher, she has to make a decision. Is she doing the right thing? Could this jeopardize her entire future?

Let me paint you a picture:

I'm 11 or 12 years old and we go to the Middletown branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. I browse the tiny YA section (I think it was only one bookcase and I'm certain it wasn't called Young Adult at the time). And I pick out the book Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff.

Later, I bring the book along when we go to my grandparents' house to have dinner. I am rarely without a book because I generally prefer to sit and read whenever I have a choice. There, sitting on my grandparents' couch, I devour much (if not all) of the book. Its verse format is unlike anything I've read before. And the story of LaVaughn and Jolly and Jeremy and Jilly sticks with me.

Years later, I take a YA Lit course in college where we read Make Lemonade and the National Book Award-winning sequel True Believer. It's then that I learn that this book is the second in a trilogy... only the third book has never come out.

Until now.

So, when I tell you that I have been waiting years for this third book in the Make Lemonade trilogy to come out, you know exactly what I mean. I've loved LaVaughn and her story since I was a young adult myself and I was so excited to see that the third book was finally available.

I highly recommend that you read Make Lemonade and True Believer before you tackle this one.

This Full House is about LaVaughn taking the next step in her journey. I have to say that a major plot point in the book felt like a bit of a stretch, but I will also say that I love LaVaughn so much that I don't care. LaVaughn definitely qualifies as one of my best literary friends. I will suspend my disbelief to the max just to spend some more time with her. I found it to be a very satisfying conclusion to the trilogy, but I am kind of fangirly about these books so you might want to take this with a grain of salt.

And the writing! I kept flagging passages to share, but this review is already really long, so I'll just share one. Or two. Um.. or three.

LaVaughn's describing a statue she sees at the art museum:

Their naked bodies were sitting down
and they were the quietest pair of people in love
I ever saw.
You couldn't not stop and stare
at these huge connected bodies.
Bronze, made of tin and copper taken from the earth,
made into human curves and muscles and lips.
And I looked through her bent leg
almost but not quite touching his bent leg,
the pyramid shape of air under their knees,
and I was in love with them. (pp 73-74)

On wondering about love:

To have a boy find you like a treasure
he has been hunting for.
What would that feel like? (pg 104)

And her love of science:

Through a door I see the genetic analyzer
in its clean, isolated room,
a machine that would make Gregor Mendel's heart jounce.
I have read about this invention
and I recognize it 30 feet away,
a throne of smartness that looks like a refrigerator.
(Sometimes couldn't you just jump up and down
to celebrate electricity? I could.) (pg 236)

If you've got a teen who loves novels in verse, hand them this trilogy. NOW.

Let me introduce my friend Sally...

Inspired by Ms. Yingling's post about her BLF (Best Literary Friend), I'd like to post a bit about one of my own BLFs. When I was a kid I often read the same books over and over again. They were my favorites. I loved the characters. I loved the stories. I could pick them up and immediately be somewhere familiar. Fifteen years later, nothing has changed. I can still pick up those books and be transported to a familiar place with characters I love to revisit. This week, yearning for the familiar, I picked up one of my childhood favorites: Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself by Judy Blume.

Sally is ten years old and lives in New Jersey in 1947. The memory of the war is fresh in her mind and it's especially relevant because Sally is Jewish; her aunt and cousin died in a concentration camp. When Sally's brother Douglas gets sick, the doctors think the best thing for him would be to spend the winter in a warm climate. So Sally, her mother, her grandmother, and Douglas pack up and move into a tiny apartment in Miami Beach. At first things are really crummy.

Sally's new school is huge compared to her New Jersey school. She's sure she'll never find her way around. On her first day she wears the wrong shoes and her hair is totally different than everyone else's. It's taking forever to get their phone line hooked up, she has to share a room with her brother, and worst of all is that her father had to stay in New Jersey to work. Sally's trying to be brave and think about her time in Florida as an adventure, but it's not always easy...

There's so much to say about this book that I'm not even sure how to summarize it. I think I liked Sally so much because I was a lot like her. I always made up stories just like Sally does. She pictures herself getting cast in movies alongside her favorite actors (Margaret O'Brien and Esther Williams). She doesn't always understand what grown-ups are talking about, but she'll be darned if she'll admit it. She's a little too inquisitive for her own good, but it's only because she doesn't want to be left in the dark.

I haven't reread this book since I was in grade school and I thought about some things that I never thought about before. Like what happened to Sally's Florida friends when she moved back to New Jersey? Did she stay in touch with them or did she never see them again? When she got back to New Jersey, were things back to normal with her old friends? Did she miss Florida or was she glad to be home?

If you're looking for a new literary friend to get to know, I highly recommend picking up Starring Sally J. Freedman As Herself. It's still one of my favorites and it's comforting to know that she'll always be there when I want to feel like I'm ten again.