Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"What do you want from life
Someone to love
And somebody that you can trust
What do you want from life
To try and be happy
While you do the nasty things you must"
--The Tubes

"So when Brian Nelson stepped out of his fancy new truck in his fancy new work boots that his mother probably bought him at Wal Mart, I was just about as angry as I've ever been. Brian Nelson's a Hawley quarterback. Hawley's backup quarterback, but still. Quarterbacks are always pretty full of themselves--even Win was sometimes, though he had a right to be -- and Brian Nelson is just about the worst. He gets top grades and his father owns a dealership so of course he has a new Cherokee, and all the girls are after him, and last year he had scouts looking at him even though he wasn't a starter because his grades are so good that he'd raise the team GPA, which coaches always like. But ever since I've been watching him play, ever since junior high even, whenever he fumbles or messes up or gets intercepted, he always right off the bat blames someone else, which is really annoying to me and I bet it's even annoyinger to everyone else on his team who's working so hard. He's the very worst that a lazy, stuck-up, spoiled Hawley quarterback could be.
"But there he stood in his fancy new work boots and his Hawley Football cutoffs and his Hawley Football T-shirt. 'Hey, Mr. Schwenk, how's your hip doing.' "

Mr. Schwenk, D.J.'s dad, needs a walker these days after thoroughly trashing his hip while moving the manure spreader. At the end of this summer D.J. will be returning for eleventh-grade at Red Bend High--whose arch rival is neighboring Hawley High. Her older brothers were stars on Red Bend's team a few years ago and D.J. knows first-hand how hard they trained every summer in preparation for football season--she'd always been there as their necessary extra body for running routes and catching passes. But the athletically talented D.J. had to quit the Red Bend girls' basketball team last winter, forget about spring track, and watch her grades go into free-fall after needing to take over all the farm work on the Wisconsin dairy that's been in her family for generations. ("You can't milk thirty-two cows with a walker.") And now, thanks to the connection between her dad and the Hawley Football coach Jimmy Ott, that lazy, stuck-up, spoiled Hawley quarterback Brian Nelson has pulled up to spend the summer in her face, helping out on her farm.

"Brian kept sitting down. He'd lug a bale up the stack and then sit down on it, shaking out his arms each time like there was nothing in them. I've never seen anyone move as slow as Brian, not even Grandpa Warren with his arthritis. It was like he was in a contest to see who could do the least work, only he was the only contestant. Plus he was really angry now, which was good because it kept my mind off how thirsty I was. He muttered something under his breath.
" 'What?' I asked.
" 'You'd probably jump off the roof if they told you to.'
" 'What are you talking about?'
" 'Don't you see how you live? You do all the work they expect you to do and you don't even mind. It's like you're a cow. And one day in about fifty years they're going to put you on a truck and take you away to die and you're not even going to mind that either.' Brian shook his head like he was truly sorry."

Little does D.J. know, upon Brian's first arriving at the farm, that she will find herself utilizing the knowledge of her brothers' workouts to spend much of the summer in a cow pasture training that spoiled Hawley quarterback for his football season.

The scenes involving the misadventures of her dad's taking over the family's cooking and watching "The Food Channel," and one involving D.J.'s best friend Amber and are among the funniest bits of YA I have ever read. But there is also a silo-and-a-half full of stuff about life and family communications and farming to think about here, even if you haven't actually gone through an agricultural experience like I did. (I woke up twenty-something years ago to realize that the highlight of my eighteen-hour workdays on the farm was the arrival of the mail. And that eighteen hours was not nearly enough time to get done what needed doing.)

"And that's what I thought about all night long. All this stuff you never hear on Oprah Winfrey, which you can understand because if I got on the show and started talking, everyone in the audience would probably kill themselves."

Set in the land of the Cheeseheads, Catherine Gilbert Murdock's first novel is a brilliant tale about the young woman who decides she is not going to be just another cow.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com