Help comes from unexpected places in Virginia Euwer Wolff’s free verse novel, Make Lemonade. All fourteen-year-old Verna LaVaughn dreams about is college. When she takes a babysitting job to save up money for it, everyone—her mother, her friends—disapproves. Her friends urge her to take up housekeeping with them, but LaVaughn finds that she can’t. Not while Jilly and Jeremy need a babysitter so desperately so that their seventeen-year-old mother Jolly can go to work. LaVaughn becomes their only hope as the only person willing to help.
The title could be a little accidentally misleading. LaVaughn doesn’t make lemonade in the story, but the theme of hope, making lemons into lemonade, is highlighted in this novel. It’s a reference to the last of several somewhat long-winded, vivid metaphors. The verse structure is unique and makes the story pass by much quicker as well.
Wolff writes about several difficult topics, but there’s plenty of hope woven into it as well as Jolly begins to, with LaVaughn’s help, find a way to restart her life again. At the beginning of the book especially, there’s a focus on LaVaughn, Jeremy, and Jilly and how they begin to get used to each other and bond together. This, as well as their relationship with Jolly, creates many warm, heartfelt moments in the serious novel.
Slowly, despite Jolly claiming she has no family, the four create their own family and while the characters struggle with internal conflicts (LaVaughn feeling like she’s taking advantage of Jolly, or Jolly struggling with LaVaughn seeming to be a ‘better’ mother than she is) as well as external ones (Jolly losing her job), they become each other’s support system. However, the ending of the novel is somewhat abrupt and no real sense of conclusion is there. It’s like the reader turned away in the middle of their life, in a moment of hope, and it could make it more realistic as LaVaughn’s story won’t end until the end of her life, but it can leave an incomplete feel to the book.
For fans of verse novels and themes that are unfortunately close to reality that want to see just a little snapshot of life, one that contains as many trials as it does hope, Make Lemonade might be the book to inspire readers to keep making lemons into lemonade and keep turning the page in their own stories like it’s assumed that LaVaughn will do after the novel ends.
