Bad Hits: The Off Season by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

In her sequel to Dairy Queen, (reviewed here August 7) Catherine Murdock takes her character D. J. Schwenk into a turn-around year that has the whole family facing fourth and long.

In The Off Season, as D. J. enters her junior year at Red Bend High School, things seem to be looking up. D.J., Red Bend's first-ever female football player, is starting at linebacker for the team, making better than decent grades in school, and even enjoying her anatomy and physiology class. Brian Nelson, rival Hawley High's good-looking quarterback, is still coming around every weekend and even invites her to spend the day with him at the Mall of America on an errand to Minneapolis for his car dealer dad.

But nothing comes easy for anyone at Schwenk Farm. D. J. overhears a painful conversation between her parents which reveals that the farm is failing financially. Her mom suffers a serious back injury and is literally lying flat on her back on the living room floor for weeks, and D. J. can't quite understand why Brian avoids her in public after kissing her meaningfully when they are alone.

When her little brother Curtis forgets to tell anyone that photographers from People magazine are going to drop by to interview the famous girl football player, D. J. and Brian assume that the two guys are there to interest her dad in organic turkey farming. In a funny case of mistaken identity, they chat openly and pose together shooting baskets and showing the guys around the farm. Although D. J. finds out their identity after Brian leaves, she hopes fervently that the potentially embarrassing story will get pushed out of publication by celebrity breakups, and doesn't tell Brian that he may appear with her in People. When the article finally comes out weeks later, Brian is embarrassed and furious with her, and D. J. is afraid that her inability to talk things out has ruined their relationship for good.

Then D. J. suffers a shoulder separation in practice and reluctantly realizes that risking more injury in football would jeopardize her basketball ability. With the family deep in debt, a college basketball scholarship is D. J.'s only way out of her family's dead end situation, and she has to face the disappointment of her friends and teammates as she quits the team.

All of these problems are shoved to the background when D. J.'s oldest brother Win suffers a potentially paralyzing neck injury in a football game. With her mom still in serious back pain and her father and brother unable to deal with their own emotions, D. J. becomes the primary support for her brother's recovery. Initially uncommunicative and despairing, Win begins to work toward full recovery after D. J. unloads her feelings on him forcefully. As D. J. watches her brother work out his own future in rehab, she begins to think about her own next steps in life. Observing the more tolerant young adults in the university around her, D. J. reluctantly concludes that although she misses Brian, she needs to find someone who won't be uncomfortable with her size and athletic ability.

As in Dairy Queen, D. J. Schwenk is a refreshing voice who sees herself, her family, and those around her with self-deprecating humor and total honesty. There are no stock characters in this book: each person is fully realized, with foibles and strengths, and D. J. herself is a joy--a fully modern yet deeply rooted individual trying to take responsibility for herself in the world in which she must live. I hope that the hints of another sequel which I detect in The Off Season are the beginnings of another novel about this remarkable character. Teen lit needs more characters like D. J. Schwenk!

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."