by Catherine Gilbert Murdock"When you don't talk, there's a lot of stuff that ends up not getting said.
Welcome to the summer that D.J. Schwenk of Red Bend, Wisconsin, learns to talk, and ends up having an awful lot of stuff to say. In Dairy Queen, an extraordinary debut novel full of humor, football, and dairy farming, Catherine Gilbert Murdock introduces one of the most likable young adult heroines to come along in quite some time.
Grandpa Schwenk was a dairy farmer, and D.J.'s ex-football coach father was one, too, until he messed up his hip moving the manure spreader. With her dad injured, her mom always at work, and her football star brothers off at college and not speaking to the rest of the family, it falls to D.J. to run the struggling farm as best she can, including the five a.m. milking of all thirty-two cows by hand.
If that wasn't enough to deal with, the Huge Family Fight over Christmas may mean she'll never see her brothers again. Dutiful D.J. takes it all in stride — until she decides to try out for her high school football team, her best friend, Amber, starts acting strange, and she falls in love with the opposing team's quarterback, whom she just happens to be training.
Murdock's care and craft come through in every aspect of this book: the spot-on dialogue that is laugh-out-loud funny and always rings true; the stress and hard work of life on a dairy farm; the tough training, body aches, and anguish of high school football; and perhaps most important, the humor, heartache, and messiness of learning to open up to family and friends. "
From the publisher's website
