Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful, wonderful book!
Review: I enjoyed Make Lemonade (the first book) and sought out this one, the second in the trilogy. This one was even better than the first! LaVaughn is fifteen now, and her life is changing as her best friends have discovered religion (Cross Your Legs for Jesus), her mom is dating after ten years of widowhood, and her childhood friend Jody (now gorgeously handsome) has moved back into her building. Her goal to get to college is stronger than ever, but obstacles keep popping up in her life, wearing her down, until she feels like she just can't take anymore. A wonderfully touching book filled with wry humor, Wolff succeeds once again with her poetic style of writing about teenage life. (I just hope the last book in the trilogy doesn't take another 8 years to write.)
Rating:
Summary: Excellent author
Review: I love this book. V.E. Wolff is an exceptional writer. She is poetic without drawing extra attention to her style. She is the master of first person narrative. She creates three dimensional characters who are likeable and believable. She draws the reader through the story without adding gratuitous flash. I find this title and "Make Lemonade", the first in this trilogy, to be powerful books that inspire me and make me a better person for reading them.
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Summary: A Book About Life
Review: I read this book and right away knew it was for me. The descriptions in this book are very vivid and cool, teenagers like me will love this book. This book is also very sad and depressing at parts but comes together very well at the end. When I first picked up this book the cover looked extremely wierd to me...i mean come on, two faces kissing and fish??? Well, reading this book everything starts to explain itself and the reader will never know what to perdict next. I would reccomend this book to people who are 13 and older. Extremeley loved it!!!
Rating:
Summary: A Very, Very Good Book!
Review: I thought this book was excellent! It's about a 15 year girl named LaVaughn who is just like any other normal teenager; she has problems, just like everybody else. I liked it because of the fact that it showed a girl who was growing up in poverty, and how she has her dream of rising above that, and going to college and making something of herself. She promises herself and her mom that she will become something and have a better life. She also has a crush on a boy named Jody who has just moved back to her apartment building. I can't wait to read the next book about LaVaughn and her life. Excellent book!
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Summary: Paris's Literary Review
Review: La Vaughn, a 15-year-old female teen living in a housing project, struggles with the everyday pressures of school in order not to become an inner city school statistic. Daily she has the challenge of surviving poverty, the constant threat of gangs, violence, drugs that have infested the neighborhood in which she lives. Fortunately, the close relationship with her moher has taught her high moral standards in hopes that she will be able to escape the housing projects and meet all the academic challenges that will secure her future goals of going to college.La Vaughn is a very interesting character. Because of her character developement and the emotions she expresses she is such an independent, loving and hard working character. Virginia Euwer Wolff did a splendid job of developing her characters but especially the main character, La Vaughn. La Vaughn is a just one of the teens in the book. The special thing about her is that she has a strong mind but an even stronger will. She would like to succeed so she can get out of her unfortunate position. La Vaughn sees that with one choice you can slaughter your dreams forever. I highly recommend the book True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff. If tells of he hardships of an urban teenager's life. The emotions that are felt in the book are sympathetic and intensely real. La Vaughn is positive that she will acquire her dream so she can escape her urban neighborhood. The story also shows how educational systems should not let disadvantaged students fall through the cracks. Education gives hope to dreams of a better life. You should read True Believer because it is remarkably real and colorful with emotion.
Rating:
Summary: Authentic and Unforgettable
Review: No one is a faster detector of false prose than a young person, and no one less patient with anything that doesn't strike him or her as true. Young adult and children's literature has always had to be written with an ear for language. But actually writing books in free verse? Writing entire novels as extended narrative poetry? Well, yes. Virginia Euwer Wolff does just that in True Believer, which won the 2001 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The sequel to Make Lemonade, True Believer is strong enough to stand alone. It is the story of LaVaughn's 15th year, her struggle to stay focused on getting to college despite the heartbreak she sees around her and the distraction of her own shifting relationships. Her mother has taken on more responsibilities at work; her two best friends have joined "Cross Your Legs for Jesus," and not even having seen the devastation that an unplanned pregnancy can wreak on a teen's life can stop her from thinking about one special young man. The verse works better as a narrative device than as poetry. (A random example: "Their adults congratulated them/and put out a sign-up clipboard for joining/but I didn't write my name." p. 132) But LaVaughn has such integrity and the odds are so stacked against her that within the first 30 pages I forgot about the unusual format. Whether the verse works well as poetry or not becomes a moot point as LaVaughn's thoughts form an authentic and unforgettable story.
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Summary: True Believer
Review: Not only by seeing that this book won the 2001 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, it also looks and is a favorite to me. I haven't read any book like this ever before. It was amazing and most interesting book before. True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff just blew my heart away! Wolff has such vivid thoughts and such a writing ability to tell everyone how it really is to be a teenager. This book would be recommended to the ages of 13 and to adult; however some people might think that this is unnecessary because they talk about some futures about kid's personalities, such as the group called, "Cross Your Legs for Jesus." The young girl who is put through boys, school and just plain life is named Verna LaVaughn. Some of her friends joined an organization that is met together a lot and can hardly hang out with people of their own religion. Which is very disturbing but it shows how this stereotype can cause such a disturbance in a relationship with friends and even family.
Throughout this book LaVaughn has to deal with conflicts such as moving, love, and school. LaVaughn and her mother are moving because her mother fell in love, or should I say hatred. When her mother found out about what this man was doing to her she felt uncomfortable and she thought that he was irresponsible and just plain wrong. The most important detail is love. LaVaughn falls in love with a young gentleman she knew since she was a little girl and she also has a boy that falls in love with her. Jody on the other hand my be cute and smell like chlorine (he's a swimmer) but he may no be the right kind of guy for LaVaughn.Why is that? Well one day Jody was at the house, "sick", and LaVaughn wanted to bake some cookies and bring them over to make him feel better. Well as soon as she got in there she saw someone kissing him! Was it a guy or was it a girl? This book helps teenagers and even adults/parents realize how life may be in a different world or way. True Believer also shows school. A child's necessity to live and to grow up with is knowledge. LaVaughn goes to a school where you can get the knowledge by going to the Grammar build up you might have missed in 6th, 7th or 8th grade. This you will definitely need for college/ school. There is even a science class that is higher then normal level (these days called AP classes).
The cover of the book looked strange to me before I read it because it had a fish and two people looking as if they were getting ready to kiss, but now that I read it shows what she experienced from her life. By reading this book is shows me how lucky I am to have all the family, friends, teachers and other grown men and women I have around me. Thinking of the title True Believer, Virginia Euwer Wolff makes such excellent point of views and has great "imagination" as if she was the one girl who got all of this treatment and experienced of the exciting things that might happen in our life. LaVaughn feels as if she was real and she was one of my friends who needed help in her life. I will always be there for my friends and family by reading what happened to people in this amazing five star book!
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Summary: This my favorite book in the whole wide world!
Review: Starting from "Make Lemonade", I started to get engrossed in the trilogy. But I never knew this book would be so interesting and would pull me into its world!
This story is about Verna LaVaughn, now 15, and how she faces many difficulties as she grows up. It describes her life story in cut-up sentences, like Karen Hesse's "Out of the Dust."
Virginia Euwer Wolff writes the story from Verna's point of view, just like a normal adolescent's, so that people of all ages can enjoy it. Adolescents like Verna will see that they can connect to how she feels and go along with her problems very easily, and for adults, it will bring back their memories of when they were in high school.
Verna's problems reflect so many of our own problems, and it made me cry along with her in the middle when she finds out about the astonishing truth about her old friend, Jody.
This book is a must-read, and you will find yourself with your eyes glued to the book all day!
* I personally think that you should read the 1st book to get to know Verna first, but it is perfectly fine if you read this book first too.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: The belief
This book is about a girl named Verna LaVaughn. Verna is your practical 15 year old. Her friends, after so many years, have left her other friends and the Cross Your Legs For Jesus club. Now Jody her childhood friend has moved back into her building and he is more gorgeous than ever. LaVaughn's goal in life is to go to college and succeed so she is trying harder than ever to do well in school. She has even been put in a more advanced science class and a build-up grammar class to better improve her vocabulary. But on her way to greatness, changes and struggles pop up where they're not welcome and throw her off course. While all this is happening she is trying her hardest to do well in school and fix what she has messed up.
This is a touching story of a girl, the obstacles she faces and succeeding; While all of this is going on in her life, there are some comical and very serious parts that are essential to the development of the plot.
There are some parts in this book that I found that I didn't like. However, the book was a whole it was a excellent book and suggest that mature teens read it. Has a good life lesson in It, but only if you pay attention to what is going on.
Rating:
Summary: True Believer Review
Review: The book true believer was fantastic. Once I started reading the True Believer i couldn't put it down. I thought to myself as I was reading that the things that happened in the book actually happen in today's world. I am sympathetic towards the main character in this book (LaVaughn). She goes through so many hardships that people should never have to go through. She is just a normal teenager that has a crush and goes to a school she despises. I like True Believer because I could relate to LaVaughn as though she were me.
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