Dairy Queen





Graphia, 2006, 274 pgs., $8.99

By Catherine Gilbert Murdock













“Don't you see how you live? You do all the work they expect you to do and you don't even mind. It's like you're a cow.” That was part of the speech that Brian Nelson gave D.J. Schwenk and actually got her thinking. It got her thinking about how everyone can be compared to a cow and how the things she did were cow-like. But that's not all she has on her mind. She's thinking about her little brother Curtis never talks and how her older brothers aren't talking to the rest of the family, including her. As if to add to all of that Jimmy Ott, an old family friend and their rival schools football coach, decides he wants D.J. to coach his quarterback, Brian. In a town where football is taken very seriously how could she do it? Secretly coaching her rival school's quarter back while running a farm and trying to get a better grade than an F in English would be hard, but she does it and avoids being the cow the that Brian was talking about.

This book didn't have very many slow parts and when it did it started right back up again in a new way. Some parts made me laugh but there were some parts where you wanted to make D.J. do something completely different than what she was doing. Either way the book worked and was good. This book is so original that it was hard to compare to any other books. In a way you though could compare it to Romeo and Juliet, if Romeo and Juliet had football and cows in it. Only you have to read the book to find out how it was like that. If you like to read I think you would love this book because it's fun and there's never a part you want to skip. It should get a book award.