Dairy Queen

Murdock, Catherine Gilbert. Dairy Queen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

Working on a dairy farm alongside her nearly mute brother is not D.J. Schwenk’s idea of a great summer, but after her father hurt is hip, she does not have much choice in the matter. She dutifully takes care of the disintegrating farm, at the cost of failing her English class during her sophomore year, rendering her ineligible to play any sports. This is hard for D.J. to take, considering she comes from a family of jocks; her two older brothers were even town football heroes, although they never come home after a fight with their father. When the coach for the opposing team (who also happens to be a close family friend) sends over their quarterback, egotistical Brian, to work, D.J. is less than happy. After a brief confrontation and reconciliation, the two decide that D.J. should help train him for the upcoming season. Over the summer, the duo actually becomes friends and he enlightens D.J. to the fact that she is a bit of a doormat. After realizing that he may be right, she decides that going out for football is what she really wants to do. D.J. gains perspective, the ability to speak up for herself and the tenacity to go after what she wants.

The Schwenk family is not good about communicating with one another, causing several rifts between family members and making it hard for D.J. to say what she wants. Young readers may identify with this aspect of the flawed heroine, in that sometime it is hard for them to say what they are really thinking. Tense family interactions further show how the family’s communication skills (or lack thereof) have affected D.J. to her core. A quip from Brian to D.J. telling her that, “when you don’t talk, there’s a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said,” is indicative of D.J.’s reluctance to speak her mind. With a suggestion by Brian that she follows along blindly, much like the cows she tends to, D.J. begins to open her mind up to the possibility that she has the ability to do what she wants, not do what everyone else wants her to do. The reader is given a first-hand view into the journey that she takes in figuring out who she is and who she wants to become.

Most notable about the work is the fact that D.J.’s point of view and characterization is solid from beginning to end. D.J. never breaks character, saying things like "that was real nice" and never getting far from the character she actually is and was meant to be. Sometimes, when you have a novel about a character going through a change, the writer gets carried away with the metamorphosis and the character completely changes. D.J. does change and grow mentally and emotionally, but how she speaks and relates her thoughts to the reader remains the same, giving her characters' transformation more realism. In fact, her tomboy ways may appeal to a group of readers that find a lack of strong female characters like D.J. In School Library Journal, Amy Pickett is in accord with this idea saying the work may, “appeal to girls, like D.J., aren’t girly-girls but just girls, learning to be comfortable in their own skin.”

Book cover found on: http://blogs.skokielibrary.info/explorer/tag/awards/