Make Lemonade, part three

This Full House is the third and last book about LaVaughn by Virginia Euwer Wolff. The first in the series, Make Lemonade, is a beautiful powerful book that I loved when I first read but I didn't know anyone to recommend it to. In that book, we first meet LaVaughn, a girl who knows what it is to be poor. At least, that's what she thinks, until she starts babysitting for Jolly's two kids. Jolly is a single teenage mom who used to live on the streets and is getting her life together. In This Full House, LaVaughn is still babysitting for Jolly but now LaVaughn's a high school senior and balancing not just school and babysitting but also an ambitious science enrichment program for low-income girls interested in the field of medicine. Told in poems, this is a book about growing up--not just getting older but learning to accept responsibility for your actions and do the right thing even when it's not the easy thing. Most of the young readers I know are probably still too young for this book, but I would recommend the entire series for 8th-12th grade. At 496 pages it looks a bit daunting but it's a quick read since there is a lot of white space on the page. If you haven't read Make Lemonade, start there. If you have, well, there's more to the story and it's waiting for you.

This Full House, Virginia Euwer Wolff, 978-0-06-172534-0, on sale 1/27/2009

This made me think of:
Reaching for Sun by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, another book in verse, this one about a girl with physical disabilities
Mare's War by Tanita Davis, see post from 12/4/08--another story about poverty