From: Robin Smith <smithr>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2001 17:47:44 -0500

I think we all form images when we read. That's one of the reasons we often are so dissatisfied by movies and even books on tape(sometimes our
"mental" accent does not work well with the actor's voice). When I first read Make Lemonade, someone asked me about the race of the characters and I thought LaVaughn was African-American. I think it was something about her mother that reminded me of the many strong African-American moms I had known in my childhood. (However, to address the name issue, there are plenty of white women around here in Tennessee with names like LaVaughn and LaVerne.) I could not figure out what ethnicity Jolly might be but I thought she was probably white. It didn't much matter to me; what did matter was the humanity of both characters. Jolly was like so many girls I had known during my high school years on Cape Cod...pregnant early and trying to live with no support from the adults around her. Every day, she plods around, hauling her young children, avoiding the stares of the people around and the unspoken judgments about her fertility and trying to do the right thing in the face of difficult odds.
  Virginia Euwer Wolff allows the reader to move beyond the moral judgments and really think about the lives of the people we see everyday. It is a marvelous thing to write books so carefully and lovingly but to have the hard work completely hidden.
  Robin Smith Nashville, TN
Received on Tue 10 Jul 2001 05:47:44 PM CDT