The Off Season Book

This hilarious, heartbreaking and triumphant sequel to the critically acclaimed Dairy Queen takes D.J. and all the Schwenks from Labor Day to a Thanksgiving football game that you will never forget.

Life is looking up for D.J. Schwenk. She's in eleventh grade, finally. After a rocky summer, she's reconnecting in a big way with her best friend, Amber. She's got kind of a thing going with Brian Nelson, who's cute and popular and smart but seems to like her anyway. And then there's the fact she's starting for the Red Bend High School football team the first girl linebacker in northern Wisconsin, probably. Which just shows you can't predict the future. As autumn progresses, D.J. struggles to understand Amber, Schwenk Farm, her relationship with Brian, and most of all her family. As a whole herd of trouble comes her way, she discovers she's a lot stronger than she or anyone ever thought.

KLIATT

To quote the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, July 2007: In Dairy Queen, a six-foot-tall female protagonist teaches a boy from a rival high school to play football, joins her own high school's football squad, and falls in love. In the autumn immediately following that memorable summer, D.J. Schwenk is now 16 and a solid player. Her older brothers are on football scholarships at prestigious universities. Every Saturday, the family watches her brothers play football on television; afterwards, the quarterback she trained, Brian Nelson, comes over to help with chores and make out with D.J. in the barn. Then, just about everything that can go wrong in such a teenager's life does. She sustains a football injury and has to quit the team. She discovers her parents are more strapped for money than she realized. She finds her "boyfriend" is ashamed of her in public. Her mother's back goes out and D.J. takes on more farm chores. Then, to add the final straw to this camel's back, her brother Win breaks his neck playing football, and the scene shifts to hospital trauma wards and spinal cord rehabilitation facilities. For a while, it seems the author piles on every obstacle conceivable to D.J.'s happiness, but D.J. ultimately prevails. Following up the theme in the first novel about the importance of speaking up when necessary, this novel adds that actions speak louder than words. The main character is likable and certainly not an example of boilerplate teenage angst. D.J. has qualities uniquely her own that readers can relate to, sympathize with and ultimately admire. (An ALA Best Book for YAs.) Reviewer: Myrna Marler