Susie Wilde (Children's Literature)
Virginia Euwer Wolff's book is the second in a trilogy and the winner of this year's Young Adult National Book Award. Like her award-winning Making Lemonade, True Believer is written in verse. The poetic form fits her heroine, LaVaughn--a wistful, pensive young black girl, who has much to puzzle out now that she's fifteen and dealing with adolescent worries on top of those brought by poverty. The book's free verse also reflects the language patterns of LaVaughn's neighborhood, and Wolff's powerful poetry balances the ugly truths LaVaughn faces in an environment where "... the pavement around here is filthy from side to side,/the alleys reek/and they are full of deadly events that could happen any minute." LaVaughn hits adolescence hard. Her friends have deserted her for the "Cross Your Legs for Jesus" club, she struggles in accelerated classes, she falls in love for the first time with disastrous results and keeps a secret that shames her. Concerns about sexuality and feelings of hopelessness threaten her college "life plan" and her mama cautions, "You need a long memory, LaVaughn. /You can't go forgetting the minute it gets too hard." There are many people who love LaVaughn and at her sixteenth birthday party, LaVaughn finally accepts their love and is then able to accept her changes and admire her strength and resilience. 2001, Atheneum, $17.00. Ages 11 to 14.

Beverley Fahey (Children's Literature)
Where life was once so simple now it is filled with confusion and stress. Fifteen-year-old La Vaughn, drawing on the wisdom gained from her young life, deftly deals with the changes high school brings. Loyal to the memory of her father, LaVaughn's strong relationship with her mother is challenged when her mother begins to date. To keep themselves pure, best friends Myrtle and Annie join Cross Your Legs For Jesus and LaVaughn worries about the wedge their new-found faith will drive between them. First love enters her own life when a childhood friend returns to the neighborhood, causing pain when the affection is not reciprocated. LaVaughn's powerful voice and her free verse stream of consciousness is riveting. Peopled with some of the strong characters from Making Lemonade (1993) this credible narrative looks into the very soul of poverty and celebrates the family, friends and community that have shaped LeVaughn. Here is a young girl who recognizes the fragility of life and as she says "we will rise to the occasion which is life." LaVaughn has risen to the occasion and readers will be anxious for the next book in this planned trilogy. 2001, Atheneum, $17.00. Ages 12 to 16.

CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, 2002)
LaVaughn describes life at age 15 as "a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, going along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again." In a life already filled with the challenges of being a teenager and being poor, things become even more difficult when LaVaughn's two best childhood friends join a closed-minded church youth organization, and the threesome starts to grow apart. At the same time, her mother begins a relationship with Lester, whom LaVaughn views with suspicion. At school, her after-school college preparation class is a fierce and heady challenge -- her teacher, Mrs. Rose, is determined that the students reach for the best in themselves, that they will "rise to the challenge, which is life." Above all, LaVaughn is consumed by her infatuation with Jody, a boy who lives in her apartment building, while barely noticing Patrick, her supportive lab partner in science. Eventually, LaVaughn will see Jody kissing another boy and feel as if her world has been completely upended. But she will rise to the occasion, eventually arriving at a depth of understanding that true friendship requires in Virgina Euwer Wolff's beautifully written, emotionally stirring novel. The author flawlessly develops characters and themes -- of friendship, of love, of trust, of what it means to be a "true believer" -- with a stunning economy of language in this continuation of LaVaughn's story that began in Make Lemonade (Henry Holt, 1993). Honor Book, CCBC Printz Award Discussion CCBC categories: Fiction for Young Adults; Understanding Oneself and Others. 2001, Atheneum, 264 pages, $17.00. Ages 13-16.

Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2001 (Vol. 69, No. 3))
When Wolff writes a book, it's an event. When she revisits LaVaughn, as she does in "True Believer", it is a prodigious gift. This book stands alone, but includes a cameo appearance by the hapless Jolly ("Make Lemonade", 1993). In the course of LaVaughn's seismic 15th year, she grapples with all the big questions of teen life: the drifting away of lifelong friends, setting life goals, falling in love with the wrong man, making sense of sexuality and abstinence, and questioning the existence of God. Or, as LaVaughn puts it, "My life is so swollen with things . . ." With wisdom, snap, and a touch of profound sadness, LaVaughn confronts her best friends' slipping away to "be all the property of Jesus," the deeply wounding discovery that the boy she loves is gay, and the acknowledgment of her own character flaws. She is accused of being "uppity" for her academic achievement, her refusal to join the "Cross your Legs for Jesus Club" and her disdain of a brilliant, shabby lab partner. With every aspect of her life in tatters, LaVaughn confides in her scrappy mother (also an uppity woman) and begins to "rise to the occasion which is life," bringing together the rich cast of characters who inhabit her world at a sweet-16 party. The urban setting, in which six children in LaVaughn's fourth-grade class have died violently, is effectively but unsensationally sketched. In economical blank verse of graceful simplicity, Wolff unerringly reveals the inner depths of her heroine. While LaVaughn feels isolated in her confusion about life, she is surrounded by adults (including demanding, mentoring teachers) who will not allow her to fail. This is a coming-of-age story with both bite and heart, which poses more questions than it answers but never runs out of hope. 2001, Atheneum, $18.00. Category: Fiction. Ages 12 to 16. Starred Review. © 2001 Kirkus Reviews/VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Claire Rosser (KLIATT Review, January 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 1))
It's a year or so after the events in Make Lemonade, and LaVaughn is in a special program to encourage students to prepare for college, working hard in school and focused on her future. The distractions are many, of course. The friends she has had since Head Start days have joined a fundamentalist church and are excluding LaVaughn from their lives since she isn't comfortable with their new religious beliefs. Her mother has a new boyfriend, Lester, who stays with them a lot and talks about moving them into a house with a yard, in a decent school system. But the biggest distraction of all is LaVaughn's crush on Jody, a boy she has known a long time, who recently moved back into their apartment building. She daydreams about him, gets up the nerve to ask him to a school dance, but wonders what is wrong when their first kiss is a flop. Jody is obviously a nice young man who cares about LaVaughn sort of like a brother--Jody wonders why they can't have more. Their mothers have exchanged keys as a safety precaution, and when LaVaughn secretly enters Jody's home to leave him some cookies, she finds him kissing another boy and realizes the truth about why he isn't in love with her. Into this mix come the teenage mother and her little children featured in Make Lemonade. The children seem to be thriving in a special program, but their mother is struggling with school. There is a wonderful Thanksgiving described when LaVaughn's mother finds a place for them all in their little apartment. Wolff tells LaVaughn's story in the same blank verse she used in the previous book, which works well to propel the narrative forward, to express LaVaughn's emotions--her love, fears, jealousy, compassion, ambition--with the poetic images that capture a reader's heart and mind. True Believer is ultimately about beliefs--about what really matters in a person's life, about hope for the future, about love and caring. Readers, whether they share LaVaughn's material struggles or not, will get right into her life and see how much courage she and her mother have to hope for a better life, and to work diligently to realize that hope. (Sequel to Make Lemonade) KLIATT Codes: JS*--Exceptional book, recommended for junior and senior high school students. 2000, Simon & Schuster/Atheneum, 264p, $18.00. Ages 13 to 18.

Claire Rosser (KLIATT Review, November 2002 (Vol. 36, No. 6))
To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, January 2001: It's a year or so after the events in Make Lemonade, and LaVaughn is in a special program to encourage students to prepare for college, working hard in school and focused on her future. The distractions are many, of course. The friends she has had since Head Start days have joined a fundamentalist church and are excluding LaVaughn from their lives since she isn't comfortable with their new religious beliefs. Her mother has a new boyfriend, Lester, who stays with them a lot and talks about moving them into a house with a yard, in a decent school system. The biggest distraction of all is LaVaughn's crush on Jody, a boy she has known a long time, who recently moved back into their apartment building. She daydreams about him, gets up the nerve to ask him to a school dance, but wonders what is wrong when their first kiss is a flop. When LaVaughn secretly enters Jody's home to leave him some cookies, she finds him kissing another boy and realizes the truth about why he isn't in love with her. Into this mix come the teenage mother and her little children featured in Make Lemonade. The children seem to be thriving in a special program, but their mother is struggling with school. Wolff tells LaVaughn's story in the same blank verse she used in the previous book, which works well to propel the narrative forward, to express LaVaughn's emotions--her love, fears, jealousy, compassion, ambition--with the poetic images that capture a reader's heart and mind. True Believer is ultimately about beliefs--about what really matters in a person's life, about hope for the future, about love and caring. Readers, whether they share LaVaughn's struggles or not, will get right into her life and admire the hope and courage LaVaughn and her mother share. (Editor's Note: This novel has won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, among other awards, and is an ALA Best Book for YAs.) (Sequel to Make Lemonade) Category: Paperback Fiction. KLIATT Codes: JS*--Exceptional book, recommended for junior and senior high school students. 2001, Simon & Schuster, 264p., $7.99. Ages 12 to 18.

Joan Kopperud (The ALAN Review, Winter 2001 (Vol. 28, No. 2))
Eight years ago readers fell in love with the spunk, determination, compassion of fourteen-year old La Vaughn in Virginia Euwer Wolff's Make Lemonade. Now fifteen, La Vaughn returns in True Believer as she continues to pursue her goal of going to college someday. Despite the poverty of her neighborhood and school, LaVaughn believes she is "lucky, born under a star, maybe," but she finds out that growing up takes more than luck. LaVaughn's compassion, beliefs, and intelligence are tested at school, in her changing relationship with childhood friends Annie and Myrtle, and in her new feelings for Jody, a boy who has returned to the housing project where LaVaughn and her mother live. True Believer explores issues relevant to today's teens in an honest and sensitive manner. Virginia Euwer Wolff gives readers a moving, beautifully written poignant story, well worth the eight year wait -- a story that makes us true believers in LaVaughn and in the tenacity and resiliency of her spirit. Genre: Coming of Age. 2001, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 264 pp., $18.00. Ages 12 up.Moorhead, Minnesota

Deborah Stevenson (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, May 2001 (Vol. 54, No. 9))
LaVaughn (narrator of Make Lemonade, BCCB 7/93) is a committed young woman, determined to break the tradition of her neighborhood and make it to college. She moves up to a fast-track science class, leaving old friends Myrtle and Annie behind, and commits to strict after-school sessions of Grammar Build-Up, taught by the inspiring Dr. Rose and using grammar as a focus for life lessons about standards and determination. Having babysat for young single mother of two Jolly, LaVaughn knows that fifteen is old enough to be diverted from one’s life plans by a boy, but she doesn’t understand how anyone could be so foolish as to let that happen. And then she finds Jody. A childhood friend returned to the neighborhood, Jody shares LaVaughn’s determination to leave this hard life behind and get to college; he is also so “gorgeous/ I can’t look at you and talk to you at the same time.” LaVaughn is head-over-heels in love, aching for reciprocity; Jody clearly enjoys LaVaughn’s company, assenting to be her date for a school dance, but he’s not stepping into the boyfriend role. When she slips into his apartment to deliver surprise cookies, the surprise is on her: “and I recognized Jody but not the other one,/ I only noticed it was a boy./ I stood ice-still and I saw their mouths go together and stay.” Devastated at this mammoth blow to her dreams, LaVaughn shuts down in grief (“Everything is tragic./ Why didn’t anybody ever tell me that before?”) and endangers the rest of her future hopes in consequence. The disappointment-in-romance plot will resonate with many readers, but that’s not what the book is really about. While many YA books, explicitly or implicitly, treat the topic of growth and maturation, few capture it as vividly as this title. LaVaughn’s world is riddled with change and newness: in addition to her interest in Jody, her path is diverging from that of Myrtle and Annie, who are finding meaning in a restrictive Christian group while LaVaughn finds it in academic ambition, and her long-widowed mother is dating again. LaVaughn is discovering her capabilities, her strengths, her pride, and she’s also discovering their price (her old friends term her “uppity”) and their down side (she’s thoughtlessly condescending to the unglamorous but nice and devoted boy who’s her lab partner). She also discovers genuine despair for the first time in her life, and she begins to realize how much strength living beyond such despair can take--and that she has such strength. The free-verse text gets much accomplished in few words, making the pages airy and inviting to readers who might be daunted by the page count. The verse blends into the story, seeming natural and unforced, and LaVaughn’s narration is eloquent but unmannered. The effect of the verse format is musing, a stream of struggling but insightful consciousness, and through it all shines Wolff’s tenderness towards her characters and the world. LaVaughn is believable but heroic, with a wonder about life large and small that makes her thirst for knowledge and revel in its expansion; her mother is a familial hero of relentless discipline, stern integrity (her boyfriend becomes persona non grata when he suggests borrowing from LaVaughn’s college fund for his unpaid phone bills), and an ample supply of love. LaVaughn’s partners in Grammar Build-Up self-advancement are an appealing crew, and Patrick, her lab partner, is touching and sympathetic. The book is firmly grounded in contemporary reality, and many teens will recognize LaVaughn’s turmoil (“Dear God, will I ever understand anything?”). For LaVaughn, however, contemporary reality is the source of revelation. Not only is there a world of possibilities, good and bad, there is a world of choices she can make to have power over her own life. “We must make momentous decisions,” says Dr. Rose, and LaVaughn realizes that her decisions are momentous: she chooses to accept the risk of hoping, to embrace those she loves as they are, and to believe in her future. At her sixteenth birthday, she says, “I think I can live with the way life is.” Maybe she’ll convince her readers that they can, too. Review Code: R* -- Denotes books of special distinction. (c) Copyright 2001, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 2001, Atheneum, 264p, $17.00. Grades 7-12.

Rosemarie DiCristo (The Five Owls, (Vol. 16, No's. 2-4))
Virginia Euwer Wolff's True Believer is a powerful book. The second in what's to be a trilogy about LaVaughan, a poor girl in an even poorer city, it's a brutally honest, completely unromanticized look at several difficult months in her life. Yet it's also filled with resiliency and hope. Characters and situations from the first book, Make Lemonade (Holt, 1993), reappear here, and like that book, True Believer's written in a free-verse, stream-of-consciousness style. LaVaughan, now fifteen, is still realistic, still compassionate, and still desperate to go to college. She's always known the rules, as laid down by her mother: "Go to school, do homework, have safe friends, have a job after school, don't make bad decisions." But suddenly too many things are interfering with her dream. LaVaughan's best friends are fighting with her, her mother's dating a man who's talking of marriage, and LaVaughan herself is achingly, desperately in love--with Jody, a boy who doesn't love her. Nothing makes sense anymore, now that she's older: "You get older and you are a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, going along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again." And there are questions. LaVaughan has hundreds of questions. Most of them involve teenage concerns: Am I pretty enough? What does it feel like to be kissed? Why do people change? Almost lost in the background is the reality of living in a neighborhood where school shootings, substandard housing, and people who've given up hope are way too common. LaVaughan's break with her friends comes when they join a purity group with the rather improbable name of Cross Your Legs For Jesus. Myrtle and Annie's church is similarly named, and the Christians there are loveless bigots. Yes, it's a one-note view of religion, but LaVaughan's feeling that God simply can't be as vengeful as her friends insist helps her sort through her own confusion about God. It also points out something she's really not ready to admit: she, Myrtle, and Annie were growing apart anyway. LaVaughan's a smart kid and a good student, a fact the school administration recognizes. They enroll her in special grammar and Biology classes, which introduce her to new friends and, more important, to a teacher who gives her confidence, gives her a purpose, and helps her realize she has the power to change her life. It's not a painless realization--nothing in LaVaughan's life is easy--and her relationships with Jody, Myrtle, and Annie get worse before they get better. But LaVaughan survives. By book's end, she's enrolled in a summer science class, has learned a bit about understanding the people who've disappointed her, and is squarely prepared for the next set of problems life hands her. True Believer is an intimate, candid look at the thoughts and insecurities of a teenager, but it's also a portrait of a girl determined to make the best of what life offers her. True Believer, like LaVaughan herself, won't soon be forgotten. 2001, Atheneum, 272 pages, $17.00. Ages 12 up.

Marge Wood (The Lorgnette - Heart of Texas Reviews (Vol. 14, No. 1))
Reading this book is like wondering how things are and then going over to your best friend's house to catch up on the gossip. The author is so wonderful at developing characters and writing consistently with their voices throughout. The novel before this one, Make Lemonade, has the same main characters and has the same clarity throughout. LaVaughn, a fifteen-year-old girl, lives in a poor urban area. Everything she does is based on getting to college. She has a part-time job babysitting so she can save money. Her best friends since kindergarten, Myrtle and Annie, have joined a super-religious club, but LaVaughn doesn't quite want to join them. It makes her uncomfortable, the way they always classify everyone into tight little knots of "good" and "bad." Jody, another of her childhood closest friends, returns after being gone several years, and she can't believe how gorgeous he has gotten. She is obsessed with thinking about him, even though she is still determined to go to college. She and her mother have discussed college since grade school when LaVaughn's father was shot and killed. College will save her. However, the thing that probably saves her is a special class in her high school--Grammar Buildup, a tutorial class funded by grant money. The incredible teacher in that class makes all the ones there, the ones who decide to stay, aware of their individual and collective worth. A special line from that class, "I rise to the occasion, which is life," seems particularly valuable. Fiction, Highly Recommended. Grades 6 and up. 2001, Atheneum, 264p, $17.00. Ages 11 up.

Sue Krumbein (VOYA, April 2001 (Vol. 24, No. 1))
Fifteen-year-old Verna LaVaughn deals with a variety of problems, including how to keep her friends, how to act toward a boy she likes, and how to behave when her single mother dates a man. Verna is a character first introduced by Wolff in Make Lemonade (Henry Holt, 1993/VOYA October 1993), in which Verna helped a teenaged mother who needed day care for her two small children. In this second book, Verna struggles to stay friends with the girls she has known forever, especially when they join a church group that Verna thinks is too strict. When Jody, a boy who used to live in the neighborhood, moves back, Verna discovers that she has feelings for him. They even go to a dance together and have a great time. Some time later, however, when she goes to his apartment to take him some cookies, she sees him standing by his fish tank and realizes that he is kissing another boy. She is so shocked that she drops the cookies and runs. As if all this confusion were not enough, Verna is also having trouble in school. She and her biology lab partner are not getting along, and consequently, her grades are suffering. Although the story is outstanding, the real tour de force is the writing style. Wolff writes in blank verse, and as Verna tells her story, the reader moves in lockstep with her wherever she goes, laughing and crying, celebrating and worrying, wondering and deciding. It is an outstanding continuing portrait of Verna LaVaughn. VOYA CODES: 5Q 4P M J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Broad general YA appeal; Middle School, defined as grades 6 to 8; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2000, Atheneum/S & S, 272p, $17. Ages 11 to 18.