Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was such a great book. Catherine Murdock really captured the teenaged view of life and the serious issues dealt with at that time, and she was very humorous and entertaining at the same time. Dairy Queen is about a girl, D.J. Schwenk, who lives on a dairy farm in Red Bend, Wisconsin. D.J.'s family have a struggling relationship, with many, many things left unsaid. D.J.'s father gets hurt, her two older brothers have moved away and completely detatched themselves from the family and her little brother is busy with baseball and school, that most of the farm work is left up to her. When the rival highschool's stuck up, spoiled, quaterback, Brian Nelson, gets sent to the Schwenks farm to learn a little work ethic things begin to get interesting in D.J's life. They start off hating each other and being quite rude to one another. Through a series of events involving the farm, Smut the dog, Amber- D.J.'s best friend, Jimmy Ott- Brians coach and D.J.'s friend, and a whole lot of football and training, things change between Brian and D.J. Brian helps D.J. learn what it means to be in a relationship with someone, friend or family. She learns to communicate and helps her family learn as well. One of the other big conflicts in the book is that D.J. is so worried that she is "a cow", just following others orders just because, not living her life for herself and the things she wants to do. She learns to be herself when she takes a risk in trying out for the highschool football team as the only girl ever to play as far as she knows. This was such a sweet story of all kinds of relationships, Mother-Daughter, Father-Daughter, Brother-Sister, Friends, First loves... I think that this would be a very beneficial book for young adults to read. This book had 274 pages and has at least one sequel that I know about, called Off Season.

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