True Believer (Make Lemonade Trilogy #2)
Virginia Euwer Wolff, Russell Gordon, Russell Gordon (Illustrator)Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
LaVaughn is fifteen now, and she's still fiercely determined to go to college. But that's the only thing she's sure about. Loyalty to her father bubbles up as her mother grows closer to a new man. The two girls she used to do everything with have chosen a path LaVaughn wants no part of. And then there's Jody. LaVaughn can't believe how gorgeous he is...or how confusing. He acts like he's in love with her, but is he?
Living in the inner city amidst guns and poverty, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn learns from old and new friends, and inspiring mentors, that life is what you make it--an occasion to rise to.
Synopsis
We have a multitude of obstacles to overcome here.
We’ll begin.
When LaVaughn was little, the obstacles in her life didn’t seem so bad. If she had a fight with Myrtle or Annie, it would never last long. If she was mad at her mother, they made up by bedtime. School was simple. Boys were buddies. Everything made sense.
But LaVaughn is fifteen and the obstacles aren’t going away anymore. 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.
Returning to the characters and language she explored so profoundly in Make Lemonade, Virginia Euwer Wolff rises to the occasion in this astonishing second of three novels about LaVaughn, her family, and her community.
Publishers Weekly
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.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewWritten in poignant and powerful blank verse, this National Book Award winner from Virginia Euwer Wolffe revisits the characters Wolffe first introduced in Make Lemonade. Now, LaVaughn, a 15-year-old teen who's determined to break free from her constricting inner city neighborhood, is starting tenth grade...and grappling with the distractions of first love, drifting apart from her lifelong friends, and realizing her intense desire to go to college.
Living with her single mother amid poverty and violence, LaVaughn knows that the only way to "make it" is to escape to college. And to get there, she studies hard, heeds her mother's warnings, and tries to be strong. Several teachers recognize promise in LaVaughn, and she is placed in a more advanced science class, as well as an after-school program to improve her speech. She also gets a job at a children's hospital, which ultimately instills in her a dream of becoming a nurse.
LaVaughn is growing up -- and along the way, she experiences a life-altering change when a boy named Jody moves back into her neighborhood. Once LaVaughn's childhood pal, Jody is now "suddenly beautiful" -- and LaVaughn can't stop thinking about him. However, her all-consuming love is unrequited because Jody is experiencing some painful changes himself -- and his actions will affect LaVaughn in many powerful ways.
The second novel in a proposed trilogy, True Believer is both a brilliant coming-of-age story and a demonstration of one young woman's courage to succeed against the odds. Both heartbreaking and redemptive, LaVaughn's story is a testament to readers that they should never lose hope -- or stop dreaming. A richly developed character whom readers will both admire and empathize with, LaVaughn thrives against the odds; she lives the words her teacher instructs her class to repeat: "We will rise to the occasion, which is life." (Jamie Levine)
Publishers Weekly
"Eight years after the publication of her groundbreaking Make Lemonade, Wolff surpasses herself with this sequel," said PW in our Best Books citation. "In delving into LaVaughn's life, the author unmasks the secret thoughts adolescents hold sacred and lets her readers know they are not alone." Ages 12-up. (Oct.)Publishers Weekly -
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.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.Children's Literature
Virginia Euwer Wolff's book is the second in a trilogy and the winner of this year's Young Adult National Book Award. Like her award-winning Making Lemonade, True Believer is written in verse. The poetic form fits her heroine, LaVaughn--a wistful, pensive young black girl, who has much to puzzle out now that she's fifteen and dealing with adolescent worries on top of those brought by poverty. The book's free verse also reflects the language patterns of LaVaughn's neighborhood, and Wolff's powerful poetry balances the ugly truths LaVaughn faces in an environment where "... the pavement around here is filthy from side to side,/the alleys reek/and they are full of deadly events that could happen any minute." LaVaughn hits adolescence hard. Her friends have deserted her for the "Cross Your Legs for Jesus" club, she struggles in accelerated classes, she falls in love for the first time with disastrous results and keeps a secret that shames her. Concerns about sexuality and feelings of hopelessness threaten her college "life plan" and her mama cautions, "You need a long memory, LaVaughn. /You can't go forgetting the minute it gets too hard." There are many people who love LaVaughn and at her sixteenth birthday party, LaVaughn finally accepts their love and is then able to accept her changes and admire her strength and resilience.—Susie Wilde
VOYA
Fifteen-year-old Verna LaVaughn deals with a variety of problems, including how to keep her friends, how to act toward a boy she likes, and how to behave when her single mother dates a man. Verna is a character first introduced by Wolff in Make Lemonade (Henry Holt, 1993/VOYA October 1993), in which Verna helped a teenaged mother who needed day care for her two small children. In this second book, Verna struggles to stay friends with the girls she has known forever, especially when they join a church group that Verna thinks is too strict. When Jody, a boy who used to live in the neighborhood, moves back, Verna discovers that she has feelings for him. They even go to a dance together and have a great time. Some time later, however, when she goes to his apartment to take him some cookies, she sees him standing by his fish tank and realizes that he is kissing another boy. She is so shocked that she drops the cookies and runs. As if all this confusion were not enough, Verna is also having trouble in school. She and her biology lab partner are not getting along, and consequently, her grades are suffering. Although the story is outstanding, the real tour de force is the writing style. Wolff writes in blank verse, and as Verna tells her story, the reader moves in lockstep with her wherever she goes, laughing and crying, celebrating and worrying, wondering and deciding. It is an outstanding continuing portrait of Verna LaVaughn. VOYA CODES: 5Q 4P M J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Broad general YA appeal; Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2000, Atheneum/S & S, 272p, Ages 12 to 18.Reviewer: Sue Krumbein SOURCE: VOYA, April 2001 (Vol. 24, No.1)From The Critics
Eight years ago readers fell in love with the spunk, determination, compassion of fourteen-year old La Vaughn in Virginia Euwer Wolff's Make Lemonade. Now fifteen, La Vaughn returns in True Believer as she continues to pursue her goal of going to college someday. Despite the poverty of her neighborhood and school, LaVaughn believes she is "lucky, born under a star, maybe," but she finds out that growing up takes more than luck. LaVaughn's compassion, beliefs, and intelligence are tested at school, in her changing relationship with childhood friends Annie and Myrtle, and in her new feelings for Jody, a boy who has returned to the housing project where LaVaughn and her mother live. True Believer explores issues relevant to today's teens in an honest and sensitive manner. Virginia Euwer Wolff gives readers a moving, beautifully written poignant story, well worth the eight year wait — a story that makes us true believers in LaVaughn and in the tenacity and resiliency of her spirit. Genre: Coming of Age. 2001, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 264 pp., $18.00. Ages 12 up. Reviewer: Joan Kopperud; Moorhead, MinnesotaFrom The Critics
Virginia Euwer Wolff's True Believer is a powerful book. The second in what's to be a trilogy about LaVaughan, a poor girl in an even poorer city, it's a brutally honest, completely unromanticized look at several difficult months in her life. Yet it's also filled with resiliency and hope. Characters and situations from the first book, Make Lemonade (Holt, 1993), reappear here, and like that book, True Believer's written in a free-verse, stream-of-consciousness style. LaVaughan, now fifteen, is still realistic, still compassionate, and still desperate to go to college. She's always known the rules, as laid down by her mother: "Go to school, do homework, have safe friends, have a job after school, don't make bad decisions." But suddenly too many things are interfering with her dream. LaVaughan's best friends are fighting with her, her mother's dating a man who's talking of marriage, and LaVaughan herself is achingly, desperately in love—with Jody, a boy who doesn't love her. Nothing makes sense anymore, now that she's older: "You get older and you are a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, going along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again." And there are questions. LaVaughan has hundreds of questions. Most of them involve teenage concerns: Am I pretty enough? What does it feel like to be kissed? Why do people change? Almost lost in the background is the reality of living in a neighborhood where school shootings, substandard housing, and people who've given up hope are way too common. LaVaughan's break with her friends comes when they join a purity group with the rather improbable name of Cross Your Legs For Jesus. Myrtle and Annie'schurch is similarly named, and the Christians there are loveless bigots. Yes, it's a one-note view of religion, but LaVaughan's feeling that God simply can't be as vengeful as her friends insist helps her sort through her own confusion about God. It also points out something she's really not ready to admit: she, Myrtle, and Annie were growing apart anyway. LaVaughan's a smart kid and a good student, a fact the school administration recognizes. They enroll her in special grammar and Biology classes, which introduce her to new friends and, more important, to a teacher who gives her confidence, gives her a purpose, and helps her realize she has the power to change her life. It's not a painless realization—nothing in LaVaughan's life is easy—and her relationships with Jody, Myrtle, and Annie get worse before they get better. But LaVaughan survives. By book's end, she's enrolled in a summer science class, has learned a bit about understanding the people who've disappointed her, and is squarely prepared for the next set of problems life hands her. True Believer is an intimate, candid look at the thoughts and insecurities of a teenager, but it's also a portrait of a girl determined to make the best of what life offers her. True Believer, like LaVaughan herself, won't soon be forgotten. 2001, Atheneum, 272 pages,— Rosemarie DiCristo