It is hard to know where to begin when talking about Octavian Nothing. I guess the first thing I’d like to say is that the less you read about it in advance, the better. (I won’t be giving away anything here, not even the most basic summary.) I’ve started to avoid reviews and even book jacket blurbs of books before reading them. I can’t tell you how much it’s enriched my reading experiences lately. Even a one-line summary often gives away too much.

So … Octavian Nothing. It carried me away. It just took me out of my body and mind and placed me squarely on Octavian’s journey with him. It was a sucker punch to my gut and my heart. People would ask me what the book was about, from family members around the fireplace to strangers standing nearby at baggage claim, and I felt at a loss. The first volume takes its sweet time in letting the story unfold, and before I was really sure what was going on, I said, “I’m not really sure. But it feels — sinister.” And it did feel sinister, a lot of the time. It felt shocking and horrifying and terrifying and sad. But it also felt hopeful and moving and ultimately profound. This book is profound. It just — is. It’s not only a thoroughly engrossing and gripping and epic story with characters who spring to life with an insane degree of vividness, it’s a book about ideas. About science and faith. About the nature of humanity. About good and evil. About revolution. About freedom. I don’t even know how to explain it. I will never be able to do it justice.

This book just crushed me, and it took my breath away. I don’t say that lightly. It also made me laugh out loud sometimes, even though you’d never describe it as “funny.” But there is humor — not often, certainly, but every now and then, and lightness. There has to be, otherwise you might pull the covers over your head while reading and never come out again. But you see — that’s the thing. You will come out, because you will want to keep reading. You probably won’t be able to put this book down.

It’s not a page turner in the sense that the words fly by you — the words are hard, and strange, and there’s a rhythm/syntax to them that feels unfamiliar and takes some getting used to when you first start reading. (At least it did for me.) But it definitely became a page turner for me — at first just so I could figure out what in the hell was going on, and ultimately so I could find out what would be Octavian’s fate. And everyone else’s in the story that I soon fell in love with. (Or hated passionately.) Volume two definitely moves at a faster clip than volume one, but just be patient. It is all worth the wait.

God, this book — what a book.

I found myself wondering time and again how this book was ever marketed for teens. Obviously it has been, and successfully — bestseller, multiple prestigious awards, and so forth. The author himself has said he intended it for older teens, and I definitely think that’s the perfect audience for this book. It’s dark and frightening and violent, but it’s also totally a coming of age story — and it is, at its heart, so much about the questions older teens sometimes ask themselves as they find their ways in the world — What does it mean to be brave? What does it mean to be free? What are my special gifts? How will I ever become my own person? Why are we here? Does God exist? Does good exist? How can human beings treat other human beings like this? How will I survive this loss? Is war the answer? What is the value of a single life?

I also ask myself if I would have picked it up and read it as a teen. I think I might have, but I think it would have only been at someone’s urging. The urging that we hear that so often rocks our worlds:

“Read this book. Don’t give up, even if it’s tough at first. You will love it. It will change you.”

I guess that’s what I’m trying to say right now.

Eleven years later, last January, I picked up this little book to read again, and it packed the same emotional punch that it did a lifetime ago. A quick Google search told me two things. The first was that Virginia Euwer Wolff looks like this, which blew my mind. I have read enough books and am not such a dummy that I think that writers never create stories completely from their imaginations or that every novel is semi-autobiographical. Even though I know this intellectually, I was still surprised to realize that the voice of this African American girl came from this white woman. I’m not sure why I’m going into this, but there it is. It just made me even more impressed by her talent. (Although I read an interview with her today in which she says she wants to leave the characters’ races up to the imagination of the reader … okay. This is also making me reel a bit. But not necessarily in a bad way. In a thought-provoking way.)

The second thing I learned, which was even more stunning, was that this book had a sequel. True Believer. Which was published in 2001. And was a Printz Honor Book. AND WON THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. WHAT?! I seriously thought I might fall over into a dead faint. I ordered it immediately, and I loved it completely, just as completely as I’d loved Make Lemonade.

A few days ago, after finishing my second read of True Believer, I told Melissa that the next two books I wanted to review for Kidliterate were these two. And again, I headed to Google and was bowled over to find that the third book in the trilogy was published in February of this year. I really need to get with the program because I don’t know how I keep missing these major literary events in the lives of these characters I love. Anyway.

Make Lemonade tells the story of 14-year-old LaVaughn, who takes a babysitting job to earn extra cash. LaVaughn has a single mom and is also babysitting for one — her client, Jolly, is not much older than LaVaughn, and she has two small children, each with a different deadbeat dad. Jolly is like a living example of everything LaVaughn is striving not to be — LaVaughn WILL go to college, even if it kills her, and even though she doesn’t have much, she has an engaged and formidable mother who loves her more than life and demands excellence from her. Jolly is what LaVaughn might be in a parallel universe without that mother as her life’s backbone, and this never escapes LaVaughn as she tends to those precious kids, Jilly and Jeremy, and cleans Jolly’s squalid apartment over and over again. Jolly’s situation is so unimaginably difficult and seems so impossible, but there it is, staring LaVaughn in the face every day. LaVaughn becomes much more than Jilly and Jeremy’s babysitter — she becomes like another parent, even like Jolly’s parent — like the responsible adult in the family, even though she’s still a child herself. There is so much passion between LaVaughn and Jolly — so much anger and resentment and sometimes even hate.

In her excitement to say it all she’s starting to yell
and her hair is shaking at me
and she says, “You come here just to make me feel like a
cockroach. LaVaaawwwnnnn. You come in here with your
homework, you got your Goals–” she says it sneering.
“You got your Cay-pa-bulls–” she says it to ridicule me.
“You’re Miss Perfect and my kitchen floor is too DIR-tee
for you to walk on
and you tell me how cuuuute Jeremy rides the bus,
and you stole his toilet training,
you stole it from his own mother,
and you have your little Jeremy-songs
you can make up out of your head,
you’re such a good little mama I could PUKE.”

But sometimes, every now and then, there are laughs between LaVaughn and Jolly. And moments of understanding.

And I want to put my arms all the way around Jolly
in congratulation
and I’m happy she’s so angry
and I’m proud of her …

But I don’t go hugging Jolly.
She’s too angry to hug.
And that’s the day Jilly chooses –
it’s like she just lay on the floor and chose –
she ups and walks.
Jolly and me we’re being mad together in the kitchen
and Jolly’s picking up the mess of banana
that Mr. Jeremy left on a chair.
and up comes Jilly
on her two feet
looking like somebody on a boat deck,
with her surprised face
not knowing whether she’s gonna fall down
or fly.

What LaVaughn is able to cope with under the circumstances while loving and teaching these kids is astounding, and you realize quickly that LaVaughn is one fiercely tough and smart cookie. There are moments of real sadness and desperation and fear in this book that will leave you with your heart in your throat.

It’s written sort of in verse, which could be annoying but isn’t. I underlined so many passages in this book that it almost looks like I underlined the entire thing. Because I keep everything, I went back and found my assigned reflection on the book in my graduate school papers. I wrote this in 1997: “I LOVE THIS BOOK, I really do. I feel I should cut myself off before I sit here about talk about every part I love, because I’d write myself armless.” (My professor’s comment: “When I chose this book, I wasn’t sure how everyone would respond; I just knew I had to include it! I’m glad others had profound responses!” God bless Flo Durway, that magnificent professor who gave me this book and so many wonderful other ones!)

In short: this book cracked my heart wide open.

In book two, True Believer, LaVaughn is a little older (15) and a little wiser. (Jolly & co., so prominent in Make Lemonade, are not central figures in the sequel — which made me really sad at first after becoming so attached to them — but they’re still present in LaVaughn’s life to some degree and thankfully do make a few key appearances here.) The sequel’s story (told in the same verselike form) mainly centers on major changes in LaVaughn’s life in terms of her friendships, her coursework, and her first love. 

There’s a growing rift between LaVaughn and her two oldest and closest friends, Myrtle and Annie. While they fervently embrace church activities, LaVaughn isn’t so sure how she feels about God, and it divides them in a way that deeply wounds and confuses LaVaughn. 

I want to say, “Yes! I’ll be in your club!”
But I don’t do it,
it doesn’t feel right.
I don’t think that it is the job of Jesus, to keep me pure.
And I don’t mean to be mean to Jesus in my thoughts
that little baby born in a manger…
I spend hours in my room
going over it all …
going over it all again.
There was too much of it.
Besides everything else,
all those people in Hell
if Myrtle & Annie’s church is right:
All those people I love.
I keep trying to think it through.

LaVaughn enrolls in more challenging classes at school and is a bit overwhelmed by the head-spinningly exciting new knowledge she’s absorbing, especially in terms of grammar and the wonders and mysteries of science. Patrick is her lab partner.

If I do well in the new class like he says,
will that make me have a good life? …
I’m thinking: Poor Myrtle & Annie.
Lucky Patrick, Lucky me.
But they have Jesus.
But I have my new class.
Insects evolved wings 350 million years ago.
Bird bones have a honeycomb structure.
We have 98% the same genes as chimps and gorillas.
The synapses of that little Jeremy,
my sweet little baby-sitting boy from last year,
his synapses are already formed. He is 3.
Science is amazing. Patrick even says it’s beautiful.
One thing for sure: It’s so quiet in this room.
You can hear the teacher whenever you want to.
I think they even have more watts in the bulbs.

Her childhood playmate, Jody, returns to her building and her school, and her world is rocked to the core by her powerful romantic feelings for this boy who is now a gorgeous young man who swims every day and smells like a swimming pool.

A mature person
would not pretend her pillow
was Jody and kiss it
all crying wet tears all over it

even with stuff coming out her nose.
Somebody logical would not
wake in the middle of the night

and get up and go over to the chair
where the beautiful dress was draped over
and put her face down in it
to try to smell the delicious chlorine
and cry so confused
about everything being so spoiled.

LaVaughn is so completely and utterly 15. The big things and the small things are all catastrophic in some way … don’t you remember what that felt like? When you really started understanding how tiny you were in the scope of the universe, when you felt so raw and so lost and so alive? This book is so painfully realistic in its portrayal of those crucial moments in mid-adolescence that it makes you feel everything LaVaughn feels with the same intensity — when her heart soars, so does yours, and when she is mortified or hurt, you want to die a thousand deaths right along with her. And when you come to the part which explains the book’s title — oh, Lordy. There will be tears. (At least there were for me.)

I am beside myself with anticipation about the arrival of book three, This Full House, which I immediately ordered, of course, from my friendly neighborhood independent bookseller. I’m trying to carefully avoid spoilers, but from what I gather, it brings Jolly back into focus, which definitely feels right, as it was LaVaughn’s relationship with her and her children that started this journey. I cannot wait to see how the story turns out.

(Order Make Lemonade and True Believer and This Full House from an independent bookseller today!)