CCBC (Cooperative Children's Book Center Choices, 1993)
This word COLLEGE is in my house / and you have to walk around it in the rooms / like furniture." It's to earn money for college that fourteen-year-old LaVaughn takes a babysitting job working for 17-year-old single mother Jolly after school. Taking care of Jeremy, who's two, and baby Jilly is a huge job, and it's not made any easier by the fact that Jolly's life is barely balanced on the brink of disaster. One night she comes home beaten up. Another night she doesn't come home at all. But even as LaVaughn assumes more and more responsibilty for this small, struggling family, she senses she is gaining something vital from being with all of them, even Jolly, or perhaps especially Jolly. Stunning, provacative prose ("Bathing with Jilly / is like going someplace warm into a tribe / and doing rituals. She decorates my face with suds / and fills the bathroom with cooing sounds nobody but a baby makes, / like she's sending signals / to Martians.") and solid characterizations are combined in this intriguing novel that looks like a narrative poem, but is actually lines of text broken to reflect the rhythm of spoken language. Honor Book, 1993 CCBC Newbery Award Discussion. CCBC categories: Fiction For Teenagers. 1993, Henry Holt, 200 pages, $15.95. Ages 12-16.

Kirkus (Kirkus Reviews, 1993)
Wolff follows her rich portrait of a gifted young musician (The Mozart Season, 1991, ALA Notable) with a spare, beautifully crafted depiction of a 14-year-old whose goal of escaping poverty is challenged by friendship with a single teenage mother. With the support of her widowed mom, who's always made ends meet, LaVaughn sets her sights on college but knows she'll have to come up with the money herself. Taking a job earing for Jolly's babies while Jolly works, she's soon enmeshed in the young woman's problems--especially after Jolly is fired for spurning a harassing boss. Deeply concerned for the feckless, near-illiterate 17-year-old's welfare, LaVaughn is tempted to give her the money she's saved; yet (as marvelously encapsulated in LaVaughn's internal debate) she makes the tough decision that "That won't help...I feel very mixed but my eyes stay steady." With difficulty (Jolly's too proud to ask for welfare and fears losing her children), she persuades her to enter a high-school program for young mothers. It's best for both--Jolly begins to "take hold" of her life--but bittersweet: while LaVaughn's grades go back up, she must relinquish her beloved charges. LaVaughn's narrative--brief, sometimes ungrammatical sentences in uneven lines, like verse--is in a credible teenage voice suited to readers like Jolly herself; yet it has the economy and subtlety of poetry. These girls could be from more than one ethnic group and almost any inner city--the setting is deliberately vague; but their troubles--explored in exquisite specificity--are universal. Hopeful--and powerfully moving. 1993, Holt, $15.95. Starred Review. © 1993 Kirkus Reviews/VNU eMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Joyce C. Lackie (The ALAN Review, Spring 1994 (Vol. 21, No. 3))
Trying to raise money for college and a better life, fourteen-year-old LaVaughn babysits for Jolly, a single mother, in her squalid apartment. Seventeen and almost illiterate, Jolly has two children and works nights in a factory. LaVaughn, drawn into Jolly's problems, begins babysitting for free and seeing her grades suffer. She ultimately coaxes an unwilling Jolly into a Moms Up Program, where Jolly begins to turn her life around. Wolff's lyrical style appears like poetry on the page, the lines of text broken into natural phrases. Told from LaVaughn's point of view, the narrative captures the poignant relationship between LaVaughn and Jolly's dirty but charming children, creating a sensitive and caring heroine. The book's strongest appeal will be to junior high girls. In an age of music videos demeaning to young women, Make Lemonade presents a strong message on survival skills and how to develop them. 1993, Henry Holt, 200 pp., $15.00. Ages 12 up.

Roger Sutton (The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, July/August 1993 (Vol. 46, No. 11))
LaVaughn, fourteen, has taken on an afterschool babysitting job for Jolly, a seventeen-year-old mother of two, and here's how it is: "The plates are pasted together with noodles/ and these rooms smell like last week's garbage/ and there isn't a place I can put my book to study for school/ except places where something else already is." LaVaughn tells the story of her growing involvement with Jolly's family through brief, one or two-page chapters of free verse, a daring and successful experiment for Wolff, who got so neatly into the thought and speech patterns of a mentally handicapped narrator in Probably Still Nick Swansen (BCCB 12/88). LaVaughn is smart and determined to get to college, an ambition aggressively promoted by her formidable mother. Yet even as she knows there are easier, better-paying jobs than babysitting Jeremy (two) and Jilly (a baby), she feels drawn by Jolly's immense need and rewarded by small epiphanies, as when Jilly crawls all the way across the dirty kitchen floor for the first time: "I thought about how I was blaming Jolly/ for having Jilly when she should know better,/ and then here comes Jilly on her own steam/ all the way across the floor/ to land here like a boat nobody expected." The poetic structure allows for such moments of unforced lyricism, but it always flows naturally as speech and doesn't gloss over the dismal circumstances of Jolly's life, as when she's fired from her factory job after shoving a pencil into the hand of a supervisor who's tried to molest her: "Do I hafta wear a SIGN/ says 'NO MORE MEN CLIMBIN' ALL OVER ME,/ LOOK WHAT YOU DONE ALREADY'?" This is tough stuff, and while it's occasionally preachy via the words of LaVaughn's mother and teachers, the book as a whole remains faithful to LaVaughn's insistent and original voice. R*--Highly recommended as a book of special distinction. (c) Copyright 1993, The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1993, Holt, 200p, $15.95. Grades 7-10.