Off Season by Catherine Murdock

From the Publisher

Life is looking up for D. J. Schwenk, star of Dairy Queen. She’s made it to eleventh grade, she’s reconnecting with her best friend, and she’s got a thing going with Brian Nelson. But best of all, she’s playing for the Red Bend High School football team—as the first female linebacker in northern Wisconsin.
But then the season goes suddenly, horribly wrong: her brother Win is put into the hospital after getting a devastating injury during a game. Once again, D.J. is forced to step up and be there for her family. It’s a heavy burden, even for D.J.’s strong shoulders. She’ll have to dig deeper than she’s ever had to before.

Children's Literature

D.J. Schwenk has a pretty good thing going. She is on the football team at her high school, has a boyfriend (sort of), and is reconnecting with her best friend. Then things start to unravel. First she has to choose between football and basketball in order to secure a scholarship. Then her boyfriend starts avoiding her. But those issues become minor when her quarterback brother is seriously injured in a college football game. Her parents are unable to travel, and she has to be the one to go to him in the hospital. There she realizes how strong she really is. D.J. is a wonderful character. She is athletic and strong, the opposite of the way young women are usually presented on the TV and in a lot of literature. Girls who liked her in the first book, Dairy Queen, will love her in this one. The author deftly combines large scale crisis, a brother who is paralyzed, with the small details that teens normally deal with, such as what to do when her boyfriend does not call. She is a realistic character in a realistic setting. Girls, especially those that are often accused of being tomboys, will love seeing themselves in D.J. Reviewer: Heather Robertson Mason

VOYA

Murdock pens an enjoyable, satisfying sequel to the coming-of-age story in Dairy Queen (Houghton Mifflin, 2006/VOYA June 2006). The first chapter, lovingly told about the town's annual Labor Day baseball game in which every child "gets a hit," grabs the reader. All is not sugary sweet, though. Seventeen-year-old Darlene Joyce (DJ) Schwenk, having just started playing high school football, is sidelined by a shoulder injury. Meanwhile her older brother and star college quarterback, Win, gets a paralyzing spinal cord injury during a game, landing him in rehab. DJ's blossoming romance with Brian hits a snag because he keeps their relationship a secret, uncomfortable with the fact that she is "different." DJ, forced to stay with Win in the hospital and rehab, has ample time to reflect on, among other things, Brian, her family's dynamics, and the Schwenk farm's failing finances. The book's ending, although hopeful, is not forced. The story is told by DJ in an easygoing, homey, conversational manner, using language typically used by a seventeen-year-old. Over the six months of the story, DJ describes her thoughts and insights, the activity around her, and the family's emotional traumas. The reader almost feels like a Schwenk family member or close friend. Murdock's language is descriptive. There is action as well as introspection in this story of overcoming adversity, using sports as the backdrop but attracting and inspiring both sports fans and non-fans, boys and girls alike. Although the novel stands alone, more enjoyment will be had by those who have read Dairy Queen first. Murdock has another winner.

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

Tricia MelgaardCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information. - School Library Journal

Gr 7-10
Female linebacker D.J. Schwenk is back in Catherine Gilbert Murdock's delightful sequel (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) to Dairy Queen (Houghton Mifflin, 2006; Listening Library, 2006). D.J. is in the 11th grade and an appreciated member of the Red Bend High School football team. She's dating (sort of) Brian Nelson from a rival town's team. Everything changes when the teenager suffers a shoulder injury and her sports career is threatened. Weird things are happening with Brian, too. He wants to keep their relationship a secret and seems embarrassed to be seen with her. D J.'s life takes an unexpected turn when her brother has to deal with a spinal-cord injury incurred during a football game, and she must have the tenacity to encourage his recovery. Narrator Natalie Moore provides just the right voice for D J. to project her humor and warmth. Listeners will relate to these appealing characters and the slice-of-life plot reminiscent of novels by Sharon Creech and Joan Bauer. Hopefully, we haven't heard the last from D.J.

Kirkus Reviews

D.J. Schwenk, the first girl linebacker on the Red Bend High football team, returns to tell the story of her first season. Having spent the summer training-and falling for-the rival school's quarterback, it's bound to be an exciting one. But when first she and then her brother, starting QB for the University of Washington, are injured, gridiron success and romance take a back seat to pure survival. The looming failure of the Schwenks' dairy farm comes to the fore, and D.J. realizes that a highly uncertain future lies before her. D.J.'s self-deprecating voice is just as distinct in this outing as in Murdock's debut, Dairy Queen (2006), and the supporting characters, particularly her very quirky family, just as vivid. If this offering suffers somewhat from both sequel-itis and a diffusion of energy resulting from D.J.'s removal from the farm to assist in her brother's recuperation, readers will forgive easily. D.J.'s personality is thoroughly endearing, and the choices she makes as she grapples with her future are both hard and deeply felt. Readers will root for both D.J. and a third installment with equal vigor. (Fiction. YA)

Product Details

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Every labor day, the Jorgensens—they own Jorgensens’ Ice Cream—set up a little ice cream stand right in their yard, which means you can spend the entire Labor Day picnic making yourself ice cream sundaes if that’s what you want to do, and for years when I wasn’t playing softball or chasing the Jorgensen kids or trying to keep up with my brothers, I’d sit myself at that little booth making one sundae after another until it was time to head home for evening milking, and then a couple miles into the drive I’d bring that whole sundae experience back up, right there on the side of whatever road we happened to make it to. Lately, though, I have a little more self-control. Now I only eat three or four, without marshmallows because I finally figured out that they shouldn’t really be part of the whole sundae thing, while I’m hanging out at the pig roast watching guys poke at the fire because apparently it’s a law that if you’re a guy you have to spend a bunch of time doing that. Then maybe I’ll grab one more between innings when I’m not pitching.

That’s the other great thing about the picnic: the softball game. Randy Jorgensen has a huge backyard he mows all year for this, and he borrows bases from Little League so it’s official and all. He even got an umpire’s getup at a garage sale somewhere, and a friend of his who owns a pig farm works every year as umpire after he’s got the pig going in the pit.

My mom used to pitch the game. She pitched all through college, and her team was pretty good from what she’s told me. Then one year shethrew her back out, which isn’t that hard to believe considering she doesn’t get much exercise these days and, well, she weighs a whole lot more than she used to. She threw out her back so much that she couldn’t walk or anything, Dad had to drive her home in the back of the pickup as she lay there like a piece of plywood if plywood could holler to slow down, and she had to spend three weeks on the living room floor until she healed. Which isn’t such a swell thing to be doing when you’re supposed to be teaching sixth grade and it’s the first three weeks of school.

So she’s not allowed to pitch anymore. But at least she started exercising again—not for softball but just to lose some weight—which means puffing around the farm fields, swinging her arms in this way that makes me glad she’s not walking where anyone can see her. I guess she figures that an elementary school principal, which she is now since she moved up from teaching sixth grade, shouldn’t be quite so heavy.

The softball game is always kids against the grownups, from little tiny kids still in diapers to old farmers who get their grandkids to run because they don’t have any knees left. There’s always lots of arguing about where the teenagers should go. This year Randy Jorgensen made a big plea for Curtis, trying to get him on the grownup side on the grounds that he’s one of the tallest people there, which is true, but seeing as he’s only going into eighth grade he really does belong on the kids’ team.

After Mom hurt her back, Randy tried pitching but he took it way too seriously, and the next year Mom suggested me, and now I guess it’s just tradition. Which is nice because I don’t play school softball seeing as I run track, and this fall of course I was playing football, which is another whole story in and of itself, so this is how I get my softball fix. Plus I’m not too biased. Mom says I’m Switzerland, which I think she means as a compliment.

Besides, it’s not like competitive softball. You mostly just try to get the ball across the plate slow enough for whoever’s trying to hit it, and keep it dry from the guys who hit with a beer in their other hand. Some little kids hold the bat out like they’ve never held a bat before, which some of them haven’t, and I’ll toss the ball as gently as I can against the bat, which in this game counts as a hit, and the kid will be so surprised they’ll just stand there while everyone starts hollering, and their mom will have to take them by the hand to run around the bases, and in the meantime the catcher, who’s usually Randy’s wife, Cindy, will toss to first but just happen to overthrow, and so the kid will continue on to second just totally amazed, and the second baseman will fumble eight or nine times with a bunch of moaning, and the kid will make it to third, and sometimes if there are enough errors the kid will score a home run and walk around on a cloud for the rest of the afternoon.

With other folks, of course, I’m not so nice. Mom always takes a couple turns at bat even though sshe shouldn’t because of her back. All the younger kids in the outfield think this is hilarious, their principal standing there in her big floral shorts and her big pink T-shirt, looking a lot more like a beach ball than a batter. But the older kids know enough to back up. One year she hit the ball so hard it took twenty minutes to find it. I guess she needs to get her softball fix in too, and also needs to teach those kids a lesson or two about mouthing off.

Then there’s Curtis, who’s always a huge part of the game, and I’m not just talking about his playing. My little brother might not talk to grownups much, or to me, but with little kids he’s just amazing. I don’t know if it’s because they can tell, the way dogs can sometimes, that he’s safe and he’ll be really nice to them, which he will. Or maybe he’s just a lot more comfortable with kids than older folks, and they pick up on that. But wherever he goes where there are little kids, like this picnic, they just flock to him. As soon as Curtis and this girl he was hanging out with sat down on the edge of the softball field, a half- dozen little kids started climbing on him and giggling and asking him questions, and he settled into it like being a human playground was his calling in life. Whenever the littlest kids went up to bat, he’d run the bases with them if they wanted, and in the outfield he’d make sure they got to tag out their dads and uncles, who often tripped really dramatically right before the base so it’d be easier for the kids to get them.

And then when it was Curtis’s turn to hit, the kids got so excited they were just exploding. Curtis after all was a state MVP in Little League, which everyone in town knows including the dead people, and when he walked up to home plate, the kids started zipping like bugs around a porch light, and all the folks in the outfield went way back, knowing what was coming, and I switched from nice-girl-tossing-the-ball-against-the-bat to big-sister-you-can-eat-this-one mode.

I pitched a fast one and Curtis swished a strike, and the little kids went bonkers like this was the World Series or something, and then he smashed right through my second pitch and it was clear that all those folks in the outfield hadn’t gone back nearly far enough, and he ambled off toward first base because that ball was a couple hours from being found.

A bunch of little kids, though, took that ambling personally. They ran up and started tugging on his arms, and his legs even, shrieking at him to run, and then another bunch of kids, his defenders, decided that this first group shouldn’t be so bossy and so they started pulling Curtis the other way because I guess they decided that walking would make him happier. Until finally you couldn’t even really see Curtis, just a dozen little kids hollering and waving their arms and giggling hysterically, pulling him in every direction.

You know the expression “fall down laughing”? I actually did. I was laughing so hard, standing there on my little pitcher’s mound, that after a while my knees didn’t work and I had to lie down and try to breathe as I watched Curtis getting dragged around the bases. It was, hands down, the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, that’s a very long story that doesn’t have much to do with anything. But even now that memory makes me grin, Curtis and all those little kids wriggling together . . . It’s hard to believe, sitting here in the hospital writing this down, that I ever felt so happy. That once, not so long ago, my life actually seemed okay.