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Dairy Queen Kindle Edition
When you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.
Harsh words indeed, from Brian Nelson of all people. But, D. J. can’t help admitting, maybe he’s right.
When you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.
Stuff like why her best friend, Amber, isn’t so friendly anymore. Or why her little brother, Curtis, never opens his mouth. Why her mom has two jobs and a big secret. Why her college-football-star brothers won’t even call home. Why her dad would go ballistic if she tried out for the high school football team herself. And why Brian is so, so out of her league.
When you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.
Welcome to the summer that fifteen-year-old D. J. Schwenk of Red Bend, Wisconsin, learns to talk, and ends up having an awful lot of stuff to say.
- Reading age12 years and up
- LanguageEnglish
- Grade level7 - 9
- Lexile measure930L
- PublisherClarion Books
- Publication dateJune 4, 2007
- ISBN-13978-0618863358
Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
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Review
KLIATT
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This whole enormous deal wouldn’t have happened, none of it, if Dad hadn’t messed up his hip moving the manure spreader. Some people laugh at that, like Brian did. The first time I said Manure Spreader he bent in half, he was laughing so hard. Which would have been hilariously funny except that it wasn’t. I tried to explain how important a manure spreader is, but it only made him laugh harder, in this really obnoxious way he has sometimes, and besides, you’re probably laughing now too. So what. I know where your milk comes from, and your hamburgers.
I’ll always remember the day it all started because Joe Namath was so sick. Dad names all his cows after football players. It’s pretty funny, actually, going to the 4-H fair, where they list the cows by farm and name. Right there next to “Happy Valley Buttercup” is “Schwenk Walter Payton,” because none of my grandpas or great-grandpas could ever come with up a name for our place better than boring old “Schwenk Farm.” Joe Namath was the only one left from the year Dad named the cows after Jets players, which I guess is kind of fitting in a way, seeing how important the real Joe Namath was and all. Our Joe was eleven years old, which is ancient for a cow, but she was such a good milker and calver we couldn’t help but keep her. These past few weeks, though, she’d really started failing, and on this morning she wasn’t even at the gate with the other cows waiting for me, she was still lying down in the pasture, and I had to help her to stand up and everything, which is pretty hard because she weighs about a ton, and she was really limping going down to the barn, and her eyes were looking all tired.
I milked her first so she could lie down again, which she did right away. Then when milking was over I left her right where she was in the barn, and she didn’t even look like she minded. Smut couldn’t figure out what I was doing and she wouldn’t come with me to take the cows back to pasture—she just stood there in the barn, chewing on her slimy old football and waiting for me to figure out I’d forgotten one of them. Finally she came, just so she could race me back home like she always does, and block me the way Win taught her. Smut was his dog, but now that he’s not talking to Dad anymore, or to me, or ever coming home again it seems like, I guess now she’s mine.
When I went in for breakfast Curtis was reading the sports section and eating something that looked kind of square and flat and black. Like roofing shingles. Curtis will eat anything because he’s growing so much. Once he complained about burnt scrambled eggs, but other than that he just shovels it in. Which makes me look like I’m being all picky about stuff that, trust me, is pretty gross.
Dad handed me a plate and shuffled back to the stove with his walker. When things got really bad last winter with his hip and Mom working two jobs and me doing all the farm work because you can’t milk thirty-two cows with a walker, Dad decided to chip in by taking over the kitchen. But he never said, “I’m going to start cooking” or “I’m not too good at this, how could I do it better?” or anything like that. He just started putting food in front of us and then yelling at us if we said anything, no matter how bad it looked. Like now.
“It’s French toast,” Dad said like it was totally obvious. He hadn’t shaved in a while, I noticed, and his forehead was white the way it’ll always be from all those years of wearing a feed cap while his chin and nose and neck were getting so tan.
I forced down a bite. It tasted kind of weird and familiar. “What’s in here?” “Cinnamon.” “Cinnamon? Where’d you get that idea?” “The Food Channel.” He said it really casual, like he didn’t know what it meant.
Curtis and I looked at each other. Curtis doesn’t laugh, really—he’s the quietest one in the family, next to him I sound like Oprah Winfrey or something, he makes Mom cry sometimes he’s so quiet—but he was grinning.
I tried to sound matter-of-fact, which was hard because I was just about dying inside: “How long you been watching the Food Channel, Dad?” “You watch your mouth.” Curtis went back to his paper, but you could tell from his shoulders that he was still grinning.
I pushed the shingles around on my plate, wishing I didn’t have to say this next thing. “Dad? Joe’s looking real bad.” “How bad?” “Bad,” I said. Dad knew what I was talking about; he’d seen her yesterday. I hate it when he acts like I’m stupid.
We didn’t say anything more. I sat there forcing down my shingles and doing the math in my head. I’d known Joe since I was four years old. That’s more than three-quarters of my life, she’d been around. Heck, Curtis was only a baby when she was born. He couldn’t even remember her noot existing. Thinking stuff like that, there’s really not much point to making conversation.
After breakfast me and Curtis disinfected all theeeee milk equipment and worked on the barn the way we have to every day, cleaning out the calf pens and sweeping the aisles and shoveling all the poop into the gutter in the barn floor, then turning on the conveyer belt in the gutter to sweep it out to the manure cart so we can haul it away.
Back when Grandpa Warren was alive, the barn just shined it was so clean. He’d spread powdered lime on the floor every day to keep everything fresh, and wipe down the light bulbs and the big fans that brought fresh air in, and whitewash the walls every year. The walls hadn’t been painted in a long time, though. I guess Dad was hurting too much these past few years to do any real cleaning, and I sure didn’t have the time. So the barn looked pretty crappy, and smelled it too.
Whenever I passed by Joe Namath I’d take a minute to pat her and tell her what a good cow she was, because I had a pretty good idea what was coming. When I heard a truck pull into the yard, I knew it was the cattle dealer come to take her away. I gave her another pat. “I’ll be right back,” I said, like that would help, and went out to say hello at least. Delay it. Curtis followed me out because we don’t get that many visitors.
It wasn’t the cattle dealer standing there, though.
Dad came out of the kitchen pushing his walker, this satisfied look on his face. He spotted me. “I’m sure you know who this is?” Yeah. I did. Curtis right behind me whistled between his teeth, only it wasn’t whistling so much as blowing, like the sound bulls make when they’re really mad. Because standing in front of his brand-new Cherokee in his brand-new work boots, looking about as much a part of our junky old farmyard as a UFO, was Brian Nelson.
Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Copyright (c) 2006 by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Reprinted by permission Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B003JTHWQE
- Publisher : Clarion Books; 288th edition (June 4, 2007)
- Publication date : June 4, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 5792 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Not Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 291 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,079,156 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Catherine Gilbert Murdock lives in Philadelphia with her husband, two brilliant, unicycling children, several cats, and a one-acre yard that she is slowly transforming into a wee but flourishing ecosystem.
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I adore D.J. even though she is nothing like me. Her situation is so compelling. All the crazy things that happen to her, all the hardships, all the life-learning...her voice makes going through them with her incredibly moving and satisfying, not to mention she's hilarious.
This is a beautiful story written with a very skilled hand. I recommend it to everyone as an entertaining and quality book.
One thing that really struck me about this book was its voice. I liked how it was sort of stream-of-consciousness at times. The wording was very inelegant, and that made the book wonderful because it felt like I actually was reading the musings of a teenager who was growing up on a farm. Sometimes characters in YA novels feel more sophisticated than they should. This isn't to say that there aren't sophisticated teenagers out there, because of course there are, but adolescence is a time when you spend so much of your time flailing away that I liked that it showed in this book. Even adults don't always have it all figured out, so it was refreshing to read a book like this, where I wasn't confused by a world-weary attitude that felt too old for a sixteen-year-old character.
Along with the well-done voice, this is a book that tackles a variety of issues in a sensitive, convincing way. D.J. and her family are pretty typical in that they have trouble talking about any big issues. It's uncomfortable to do this, and I could really buy into the idea that they spend a lot of time concealing what they feel. Naturally, their reluctance to talk about anything leads to a whole host of issues, and I thought Murdock did a wonderful job of showing how difficult it can be to find your voice and to talk about the things that really matter with the people you love the most. The family dynamic was just so convincing and so well done. No one is really to blame, and none of the characters are what I would consider bad, they're just all human beings whose foibles complicate their lives and relationships. I don't mind really angsty books if they have something to say, but it's nice to read something down-to-earth, where people are dealing with the sort of communications issues most of us deal with on a regular basis.
I loved D.J. as a character. I loved that she wasn't anyone uber special. She felt like a girl to whom I could relate, a girl who might actually exist. She makes mistakes, she does dumb things, and she acts in ways that hurt other people, even when that's not her intent. Yet her earnestness pulled me in, and I really felt for her as she struggled to figure out what she wanted out of her life. I think it's normal for a lot of people at that age to feel that way, to pause in the middle of doing all those things they're told they're supposed to do and wonder what the point is. I liked that D.J. had her own reasons for wanting to pursue football, and I like that, though Murdock touches on the difficulties this entails, it doesn't become some huge deal or the impetus for an epic battle. The story is more personal, and I was glad for it.
As soon as I finished this book, I noticed that there were two more and I instantly wanted to read them. While this is a trilogy, this first book isn't like the first book in most trilogies that I read. The story arc is complete, the important things are tied up, but there's still more room for story, more potential for growth from all the characters. I can hardly wait to spend more time with the Schwenks.
Any summary of this book is insufficient, because there is so much going on in this novel. Each character is fully developed with his or her own story, and we experience it all through D.J.'s eyes as she struggles through this one amazing summer.
D.J. is an awesome character and a great narrator. She's tough, and she's funny, and she's trying really hard to not think about all the things that are going wrong in her family. She doesn't whine about her circumstances, but it's clear that she's carrying far too many burdens for a girl just turning sixteen. Fortunately, D.J.'s toughness and work ethic carry her through, and her friendship with Brian Nelson changes everything for her, but not in the ways one would expect.
Brian Nelson is one of my favorite boy YA characters ever, and if I had read this book as a teen, I would have been in love. Brian is not perfect; he does several lousy things in Dairy Queen, and since there are two more books, I'm sure he'll mess up again. At the start of the book he is lazy and spoiled, and he's not especially nice to D.J. or her family. But Brian is smart, and he's talented (if untrained), and his mother has turned him into a teenage boy that can actually talk about feelings and problems, which is completely foreign to D.J. D.J.'s family doesn't talk about anything, but Brian forces her to really look at her life, and he is likewise capable of learning and changing as a result of the time that he spends with D.J. Their friendship is a joy to read about, and makes the potential for romance between them that much more wonderful.
What really makes this book awesome is that I could write ten more paragraphs about great parts of this book, be it the family relationships or the description of life in a small town or just D.J.'s unique view of the world. This book is about more than a girl who plays football, or two unlikely friends. It's about the most fully realized character that I've read this year, a fifteen-year-old on the brink of adulthood, with all the wonderful and terrible truths that come with it. This is absolutely not a book to miss!