Week Fourteen: Poetry/Short Stories: Make Lemonade

Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff (Cover image from Amazon.com)

Bibliography: Wolff, V.E. (1993). Make lemonade. New York: Henry Hold and Company. ISBN: 978-0805080704

SUMMARY
Fourteen-year-old LaVaughn answers an ad for a babysitter on her school's bulletin board. She is saving up for college (so she can be the first person to go to college in the whole building, if not the neighborhood) and her single working mother can't help her much if she doesn't save money or get a scholarship. LaVaughn starts working for Jolly, a seventeen-year-old mother of two, Jeremy and Jilly. Jolly's had a tough life--her parents were M.I.A. and she grew up on the streets, she did drugs, dropped out of school, has trouble reading and now, she can't keep her nighttime job at the factory without some help watching her two babies. Jolly gets fired after she rebuffs her boss's sexual advances and harassment. LaVaughn still tries to help Jolly and her kids as best she can, buying Jeremy's shoes, helping Jolly to enroll in a school program for single mothers, babysitting without pay. After Jolly starts passing her classes and improving her life, she saves her choking daughter with the CPR she learned from the Moms Up program. However, Jolly stops talking to LaVaughn and the two go their separate ways at the end of the book. Make Lemonade, told in verse, is a heart-breaking, uplifting, poignant, despairing and amazing testament to family, friendship, hope and education.

MY IMPRESSIONS
Make Lemonade is my single favorite book I've read all semester. This book burrowed under my skin, cracked my chest wide open, grabbed my heart and squeezed. I laughed, I cried, I raged, I judged, I hoped for LaVaughn, for Jolly and for Jolly's kids. Wolff paints believable, REAL characters who struggle every day with the realities of poverty, drugs, graduating from high school, having enough money to buy food and diapers, discrimination and self-esteem. LaVaughn makes an unlikely advocate and teacher to Jolly, and their interactions help shape both girls' current situations and their futures.

The verse works perfectly with the story and serves as a wonderful way to show the teenage characters' personalities, hardships and reactions to a world that is unfair, hard and unresolved.
LaVaughn's innocence and maturity shine through her words, and Jolly is equally complicated as she both craves and admires LaVaughn and resents her, even though her life isn't easy either after her dad was killed in the crossfire of a drive-by. Make Lemonade is a weighty book--it covers a full spectrum of mature topics: sex, sexual harassment, teen pregnancy, drugs, family, poverty and classicism, race and discrimination, public assistance, education and dependency/independence. LaVaughn and Jolly are compelling protagonists and their stories will haunt readers long after the book is over. Thank goodness there are two more books in the series!

ACTIVITIES
This book would be appropriate for a discussion with grades 8 to 12, especially due to the adult themes.
1. Why is it so important to LaVaughn's mom that she go to college?
2. Why do you think that LaVaughn kept babysitting Jeremy and Jilly even when Jolly couldn't pay her?
3. Were you surprised by the billionaire's letter at the end of the book? Do you think that he'll send Jolly another check?
4. Why do you think that LaVaughn's mom had such a hard time believing that Jolly would actually improve her life? Do you think she changed her mind by the end of the book? Why or why not?
5. What is the significance of the lemon tree that LaVaughn planted? Do you think it meant something that the tree only started to grow at the end of the book?
6. What about Jolly's story about the blind woman and her orange? Why did the story have such significance for Jolly and LaVaughn?
7. Do you think that LaVaughn will go to college? Why or why not? What about Jolly? Do you think she'll get her G.E.D.?
8. What important lessons did LaVaughn learn from her Steam Class?
9. Many times in the book, LaVaughn became the teacher of not only Jeremy and Jilly but of Jolly. Name several things that Jolly taught LaVaughn.

Write a free verse poem about either Jolly or LaVaughn, ten years after the end of Make Lemonade. How has life changed?

Golden Kite Award for Fiction
Winner of Child Study Center Children's Book Committee Award
ALA Best Book for Young Adults
ALA Notable Book for Children
ALA Quick Picks for Young Adults
ALA Recommended Book for Reluctant Readers
Booklist Top of the List
Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Blue Ribbon winner
Hungry Mind Review Children's Book of Distinction
IRA Teachers' Choice
Parents' Choice Award Winner
A Parents Magazine Best Kids' Book
Parenting Magazine Reading Magic Award
NCTE Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts
Books for the Teen Age, New York Public Library
Horn Book Magazine Fanfare List
A School Library Journal Best Books of the Year
Michigan Best Book for Young Adults
Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader's Choice Award

REVIEWS
"Jolly is the 17-year-old mother of Jeremy and Jilly. She needs a babysitter. Enter 14-year-old LaVaughn, as street naive as she is book smart. Together the two girls exist as a sort of family until the differences between them lead them on separate paths, each one making lemonade from the lemons in her life. Wolff's free-verse style depicts the harsh realities of parenting in urban poverty with equal parts grit and grace. The reader roots for both girls and for a more hopeful future. Luckily, the book is the first in a trilogy."
Library Journal, 1993

"'This word COLLEGE is in my house,/ and you have to walk around it in the rooms/ like furniture.' So LaVaughn, an urban 14-year-old, tries to earn the money she needs to make college a reality. She and her mother are a solid two-person family. When LaVaughn takes a baby sitting job for Jolly, an abused, 17-year-old single parent who lives with her two children in squalor, her mother is not sure it's a good idea. The themes of parental love, sexual harassment, abuse, independence, and the value of education are its underpinnings. The dynamics between the two young women are multidimensional and elastic--absolutely credible. The poetic form emphasizes the flow of the teenager's language and thought. Make Lemonade is a triumphant,
outstanding story."
School Library Journal, July 1, 1993