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Make Lemonade by Euwer Wolff

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The novel Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff is mainly about a seventeen year old girl named Jolly, who encounters many difficulties as she has two children from two different, absent fathers. Jolly desperately needs help raising her two children, Jeremy and Jilly, and LaVaughn helps babysit temporarily. LaVaughn is caught up in Jolly’s problems and she guides her on the right path. However, LaVaughn cannot sacrifice her academics to babysit for her because she wants to go to college and she wants to start to build her future. These two main characters take separate paths as they each develop and mature throughout the stages of the novel and they have similarities and differences. Both, Jolly and LaVaughn, illustrate actions that …show more content…

Jolly needed to take a hold in order to give her children a better life and resolve all of her problems.
LaVaughn, on the other hand, is a fourteen year old whose priority is to get good grades in school and to go to college. She wants to go to college in order to move out of her unsafe neighborhood. LaVaughn states, “that’s why the word COLLEGE is in our house... it’s what will get me out of here” (Pg 11). Going to college is very important in her household since she will be the first in her family and in her building to extend her education further. LaVaughn demonstrates her maturity and responsibility when she offers to babysit two sloppy, drippy kids in order to raise money for college. At her babysitting job, LaVaughn grows fond of Jeremy and Jilly although the job isn’t doing her much good because she is “too tired to study and keep her grades up”, according to Myrtle and Annie. She is very diligent, determined, and caring. LaVaughn is looking after Jolly and guiding her on the right path, even though she is way younger.
Although LaVaughn and Jolly have their own characteristics, they share some similarities. LaVaughn and Jolly both are very young and they enjoy the same type of humor. In page 44 of the novel, Lavaughn states, “That was so funny, that night we did the TV voices.” Moreover, both characters have “burdens”, things that aren’t your fault but you carry them around. LaVaughn’s burden is the death of her father and Jolly’s burden is the death of one of her

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