True Believer
Virginia Euwer Wolff
Atheneum February 2001 0-689-82827-6 $17.00
272 pages 8-1/2 x 5-3/4 Ages 12 and up

Virginia Euwer Wolff’s True Believer is a powerful book. The second in what’s to be a trilogy about LaVaughan, a poor girl in an even poorer city, it’s a brutally honest, completely unromanticized look at several difficult months in her life. Yet it’s also filled with resiliency and hope.
          Characters and situations from the first book, Make Lemonade, reappear here, and like that book, True Believer’s written in a free-verse, stream-of-consciousness style. LaVaughan, now fifteen, is still realistic, still compassionate, and still desperate to go to college. She’s always known the rules, as laid down by her mother: “Go to school, do homework, have safe friends, have a job after school, don’t make bad decisions.” But suddenly too many things are interfering with her dream. LaVaughan’s best friends are fighting with her, her mother’s dating a man who’s talking of marriage, and LaVaughan herself is achingly, desperately in love—with Jody, a boy who doesn’t love her. Nothing makes sense anymore, now that she’s older: “You get older and you are a whole mess of things, new thoughts, sorry feelings, big plans, enormous doubts, going along hoping and getting disappointed, over and over again.”
          And there are questions. LaVaughan has hundreds of questions. Most of them involve teenage concerns: Am I pretty enough? What does it feel like to be kissed? Why do people change? Almost lost in the background is the reality of living in a neighborhood where school shootings, substandard housing, and people who’ve given up hope are way too common.
          LaVaughan’s break with her friends comes when they join a purity group with the rather improbable name of Cross Your Legs For Jesus. Myrtle and Annie’s church is similarly named, and the Christians there are loveless bigots. Yes, it’s a one-note view of religion, but LaVaughan’s feeling that God simply can’t be as vengeful as her friends insist helps her sort through her own confusion about God. It also points out something she’s really not ready to admit: she, Myrtle, and Annie were growing apart anyway. LaVaughan’s a smart kid and a good student, a fact the school administration recognizes. They enroll her in special grammar and Biology classes, which introduce her to new friends and, more important, to a teacher who gives her confidence, gives her a purpose, and helps her realize she has the power to change her life. It’s not a painless realization—nothing in LaVaughan’s life is easy—and her relationships with Jody, Myrtle, and Annie get worse before they get better. But LaVaughan survives. By book’s end, she’s enrolled in a summer science class, has learned a bit about understanding the people who’ve disappointed her, and is squarely prepared for the next set of problems life hands her.
          True Believer is an intimate, candid look at the thoughts and insecurities of a teenager, but it’s also a portrait of a girl determined to make the best of what life offers her. True Believer, like LaVaughan herself, won’t soon be forgotten.

—Rosemarie DiCristo