Front and Center

This weekend while at a chess tournament, in a noisy and crowded room where non-players wait, I read the follow-up novel to Catherine Murdock's YA series that begins with Dairy Queen and is followed by The Off Season. The new one is entitled Front and Center, and it distracted me quite satisfactorily from my surroundings, making me remember what it's like to be a junior in high school.

In this third novel D.J. Schwenk is a little older, a little wiser, and a little more confident about speaking up when necessary, which still leaves her one of the quietest teenage characters in literature. One of the pleasures of the novel is overhearing her thoughts; I'm especially partial to the ones about what it's like to be bigger than all the other teenage girls: "Did you know that zero is actually a size? Who the heck is a size zero? Do they walk around all the time saying 'I fit into nothing,' ha?"

Reading this novel as a parent who had dedicated the entire day to one of my childrens' pursuits, I especially enjoyed getting a teenager's perspective on what moms look like when they wait:
"I finally ended up parked outside the middle school, wondering if I looked like the moms who were sitting there waiting. Like a middle-aged woman who spent her days driving around Red Bend as an unpaid chauffeur. Had those moms gone to college? Had they had a big old shopping bag of college envelopes once? Was this how I'd end up, when all this was said and done, in twenty or thirty years?"
I have put in my share of time sitting in the middle school parking lot, much of it wearing a chauffeur's hat I bought for myself (see photo) and grading papers or reading the books I kept in the car, and I have looked around at the other parents and wondered how they found the time to sit and wait in the middle of the afternoon. But I never really considered that, to some, that waiting time would constitute their view of my entire existence.

The part about D.J.'s college visits strikes a chord with me, too, as the mother of a high school junior whose concerns about picking a college have so far been mostly geographical ("not the college where you work, mom and dad!") On one campus D.J. says "the classes wouldn't be too hard, either. I'm sure you're wondering how I could tell that just from looking at the buildings, but I could."

D.J. successfully negotiates her way through scholarship offers and relationship dilemmas in this one, and the level of detail makes it all feel so real again:
"'You gonna eat that fruit salad?'
She'd heard. She heard about Beaner and she mad sure to be here, just for me. For a moment I couldn't speak or I'd have started crying. 'Um...just the pineapple. You want the rest?'
And that's how our conversation went, because when you're sitting in a high school cafeteria trying not to blubber in front of your best friend, it's best to focus on canned tropical fruits."

This is a satisfying end to D.J.'s story. There could be more novels about her, but you don't need any more to know how all the issues that have concerned her since her introduction (in Dairy Queen) are resolved. As in the previous novels, I think Murdock does a marvellous job of making her readers care about some of the intricacies of playing the sports D.J. loves. I am not a person who has ever played or followed sports, although I can enjoy watching a baseball game on a summer afternoon, or a soccer game in an autumn dusk. When I read about D.J. teaching someone to block in a basketball game, though, I feel like it's a skill that matters.

How would you rate your interest in sports on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being lowest? My interest would be at 1, which just goes to show what a good writer Catherine Murdock really is.

The Off Season

I liked Catherine Murdock's first novel about D.J. Schwenk, Dairy Queen, enough to want to read the second one, The Off Season. But I resisted for a while. Partly that's because when I like a book, I sometimes don't want to spoil it with a sequel that might not live up to the first one. And partly that's because I have a credit card with reward points at a major chain, so every once in a while we all go and get one "free" book there, and I was waiting to buy The Off Season as my "free" one. Well, it didn't take me long after buying it to use sitting in the car waiting to pick up a kid as my reason to start reading it, and once I started, it was hard to stop.

The Off Season picks up pretty much where Dairy Queen left off, with D.J. playing football for her high school, seeing Brian, and talking to her friend Amber and to her parents and younger brother a bit more than she used to, at least when it's important. I enjoy her typical low-key, matter-of-fact attitude about things. When she's watching one of her brothers play college football on television, she says that "all the camera ever does is follow the ball, which a linebacker doesn't spend too much time with. But Bill had some great tackles that we could see, and if nothing else, he didn't embarrass himself, which some days is the most you can hope for." I'm going to have to add that to my bedtime list of things to be grateful for, along with not having a sore throat, which is what I always start with, if it's true.

The matter-of fact tone produces much of the humor that I enjoy in this book. When some reporters from People Magazine come out to interview D.J. about playing high school football, she and Brian don't realize they're from People, so they do and say things they might not have wanted in a national magazine. D. J. feels embarrassed when the story comes out complete with a photo of them kissing and thinks "It's not such a good idea to go around kissing rival linebackers, at least not in high school football. I wouldn't know about the pros."

There are some serious issues in the novel, too. The farm is losing money, and D.J. thinks that "not using chemicals" hasn't done them any good because "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, folks who get fired up about buying wild turkeys that aren't really wild. 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." As one of those city folks who has paid more for a heritage turkey and for organic milk, not to mention eggs and cheese (to mention only a few of the things we brought home from the local farmer's market this weekend), I had to laugh.

But one of the central actions of the novel occurs when one of the college-football-playing brothers ends up with a spinal cord injury. And D.J. comes to some realizations about herself and her family: "All this time I'd thought Brian was brave because he could talk about really painful subjects. Like just now when he said how bad he felt--that's something Schwenks suck at, discussing feelings. I'd thought how great he was too. But a guy who's really great would have friends who are great as well. Not friends who make fun of me and badmouth me all the time. And if friends did do that, a guy who was really brave would be able to make them stop." And if that's not enough for a girl who's still only 16, she also sums up much of the action of the novel when she tells her brother, who is mired in self-pity about his injury, that "you can't control what people say about you."

D.J. is a believable 16-year-old, but she's strong...and she's big. I really like that about this character. After one of my first knee surgeries, when I was still on crutches, I went out to dinner with my husband and another friend, an operatic soprano, who is also six feet tall and who was also using crutches for a bad sprained ankle. My husband got a comment about going out "with a female football team." And we were in our twenties. I wouldn't have handled such a comment as well as I did (I didn't punch the guy...or fall on him) if I had still been in my teens. D.J. has the kind of strength that not everyone works hard enough to achieve.

Luckily for D.J.'s fans, there will be a third and final Dairy Queen book. It's due for release October 19, 2009, with the title Front and Center.

And there will be a farmer's market opening near your house soon, I'll bet. Have you ever been to one? If you haven't already joined a CSA, it's probably not too late.