Make Lemonade

When fourteen-year-old LaVaughn finds a babysitting job in order to earn money for college (and no one in her whole building has ever been to college), she ends up taking care of Jilly and Jeremy, the children of a seventeen-year-old mother trying to make ends meet without welfare help. Through LaVaughn, we see the dirty apartment and the undisciplined kids, but we also see the love of a mother and the desire to make things work better. For anyone who has experienced poverty or worked with those in need, this book will ring true. It explores how we take advantage of others, how we think we help and how sometimes we just don’t know what we need to know.

In the center of Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, we hear the story about making lemonade so different from the trite statement people throw around– that sometimes its not life that hands you lemons, sometimes its people who harm you and steal from you and through sheer strength, you can feed your children lemonade.