Girl Sports: Dairy Queen by Catherine Murdock

"The whole enormous deal wouldn't have happened, none of it, if Dad hadn't messed up his hip moving the manure spreader."

Not many teenage romances or teen-girl novels of self-discovery start out with manure spreaders, but Catherine Murdock's delightful novel Dairy Queen shows that more than just grass can grow with the right tending.

D. J. is, as she points out, a typical Schwenk, "big but not smart." With her dad laid up with a bad hip, her mom working two jobs as principal and teacher at the local elementary school, and her two big and strong older brothers playing scholarship college ball, most of the diary farm work falls upon D.J.'s strong, but not altogether willing, shoulders. When old family friend, Jimmy Ott, coach of the rival Hawley High School team, sends over Brian Nelson, his spoiled, hunky backup quarterback, ostensibly to "help out with the haying," D. J. is not pleased. Resentful of his new red Cherokee truck, his too-clean boots, and his rich and indulgent daddy, D. J. is secretly happy to see Brian struggling to keep up tossing hay bales and shoveling out stalls.

But amazingly, D.J. finds Brian easy and fun to talk with, and when Coach Ott asks her to oversee Brian's summer weight training and drills, she reluctantly agrees. D. J. soon learns that she knows a lot about football from playing with her brothers, the stars of their tiny Red Bend High School team, and working with Brian to improve his passing accuracy, she realizes that she's a better-than-average receiver as well.

That's not a big surprise, of course, since Schwenks are known to be good athletes, and she's already been noticed by college basketball scouts. The odd thing is that in a family noted for their few words, she finds herself talking to Brian about things she's never told her best friend and never spoken of with her own family. She even confides in Brian her fear that she's turning into something like a dairy cow herself, just moving mindlessly along for her whole life without objection or opinion. "When you don't talk," says Brian, "there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said."

It is then that D.J. decides to break out of the mold and go out for the Red Bend football team. Her family is mystified, her best girlfriend is angry, but after his initial surprise to find himself scrimmaging against her, Brian turns out to be supportive. Both of them realize that their time together has bloomed into something beyond farm work and football practice. Talking to Brian about her feelings and listening to his family problems, D.J. realizes that some things need to be said and some things need to be heard. Brian and D.J. find that real affection has grown out of their honest talk.

All of a sudden, Brian blurted out, "You ever date a football player?"

I thought about going to the movies with Troy Lundstrom. "Not really."

"Me neither," he said, looking off over the trees.

I don't know," I said. "I'd probably wind up breaking your arm or something."

Brian laughed. There was a really nice bit of quiet between us.

D. J. Schwenk has the honest, earthy take on life and love to be expected from a dairy farming girl with three brothers, but her absolute honesty and strong sense of self give her a wonderfully different voice as a teen heroine. As D.J. herself says, "But it turns out that even if I don't talk a lot, when it's something that matters, I still have a lot to say."