Make Lemonade

The bookcases in my room are mostly stocked with children's and young adult books I've read a million times. Paul Zindel, Lois Lowry, Jean Little, Judy Blume, Madeleine L'Engle, and so forth. Mixed in with the multiples by those authors are a few singles. One I hadn't picked up in years is Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff.

I couldn't sleep last night and could not get into the new book I was reading, so I pulled this one off the shelf and read for more than an hour past my bedtime. I just took a long bath and finished it and cried my eyeballs out. It is a beautiful and powerful little book, and I loved it a decade ago, and I love it still.

I first read this book in a multicultural adolescent literature class my first summer of graduate school. It was taught by the professor whose other class in adolescent literature I'd taken with my sister as an undergrad. That class had three sets of sisters in it, weirdly. My sister and I discovered a long lost cousin in that class as well. I could go on and on about how special that class was to me, but I won't right now. I'll just say that the fact that the same professor headed up the graduate program I entered promptly upon graduating from college was pretty much the reason I did it. I loved her. She taught me so much about teaching and about books. I was never the teacher I think she wanted me to be or half the teacher she was, but I still cherish all that she taught me, and it's books like this one that I'm so grateful to her for sharing with me.

OKAY, I JUST LOOKED THIS BOOK UP ON AMAZON IN ORDER TO LINK TO IT IN THIS ENTRY, AND I SEE THAT IT IS PART OF A TRILOGY. OH MY SWEET LORD.

And excuse me, but the second book won the freaking fracking National Book Award? And was a Printz Honor Book? Oh Jesus Pete, where have I been? Now I am crying with happiness! I do not see a third book, so I'm not sure why they're calling it a trilogy. Maybe the third book is still unwritten.

I just ordered True Believer. I am so happy. I love everyone and everything.