Front and Center (Hardcover)

~ Catherine Murdock (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Product Description
After five months of sheer absolute craziness I was going back to being plain old background D.J. In photographs of course I'm always in the background...

But it turns out other folks have big plans for D.J. Like her coach. College scouts. All the town hoops fans. A certain Red Bend High School junior who's keen for romance and karaoke. Not to mention Brian Nelson, who she should not be thinking about! Who she is done with, thank you very much. But who keeps showing up anyway...

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Amazon Exclusive: A Letter from Catherine Murdock

Dear Amazon Reader:

The Dairy Queen series began with a dream and ends with a pizza.

In late 2003, I had a dream about a girl playing football. As I'd been studying screenwriting for eight years, I immediately began to craft this idea into a script. Then, all too aware of my script failure rate, I decided to attempt a "practice novel" using everything I'd learned about character development, plotting, dialogue, and description. Today, I can offer aspiring authors this hard-earned advice: If you want to write halfway decent books, start by writing truly horrendous screenplays.

I set Dairy Queen in Wisconsin, as I have family there and so can visualize the landscape, and I laid it out as a traditional three-act script, the only story structure I knew. I never intended to write a second book--I really love the vagueness of Dairy Queen’s ending--but when the publisher asked if I had a sequel in me, what could I answer but "Yes"? I love The Off Season's ending as well, but readers (may I mention how utterly fantastic the fan mail is?) wanted more. So--boom--I found myself writing a third. All of a sudden I had a trilogy.

Given what I'd learned about college sports recruiting from the first two books, it seemed only natural to examine this in Front and Center, while of course continuing the saga of D.J. Schwenk's love life. So many stories have as their conflict "Will the hero(ine) get the scholarship? Will s/he get the love interest?" And of course you already know the answers on page 1. To me, a much more challenging story, both to read and to write, would be "Does she want a scholarship? And which love interest will be it be: the dreamboat who keeps breaking her heart, or the safe, fun guy who's not quite Mr. Right?" Call me old fashioned, but I like a little mystery in my narrative. Which is why I'm also not going to tell you how the pizza fits in. But it does. Really.

Sincerely,

Catherine Murdock

(Photo © Greg Martin)

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Product Description

After five months of sheer absolute craziness I was going back to being plain old background D.J. In photographs of course I-m always in the background . . . But it turns out other folks have big plans for D.J. Like her coach. College scouts. All the town hoops fans. A certain Red Bend High School junior who-s keen for romance and karaoke. Not to mention Brian Nelson, who she should not be thinking about! Who she is done with, thank you very much. But who keeps showing up anyway . . . Readers first fell in love with straight-talking D. J. Schwenk in Dairy Queen; they followed her ups and downs both on and off the court in The Off Season. Now D. J.steps out from behind the free-throw line in this final installment of the Dairy Queen trilogy. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Young Adult
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children; 1 edition (October 19, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618959823
• ISBN-13: 978-0618959822
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #14,937 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #13 in	Books > Teens > School & Sports > Fiction
  #84 in	Books > Teens > Social Issues > Being a Teen

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars D.J. Schwenk, Quiet Star, September 20, 2009

By	K. Coombs (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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I happily set aside my usual diet of books about witches, shapechangers, and dragons when it comes to Catherine Murdock's YA novels about D.J. Schwenk. I'm also the kid that used to get hit in the head by the ball in any number of sports with names ending in -ball, but who cares? A good book is a good book, and the D.J. Schwenk books are very, very good: Dairy Queen, The Off Season, and now Front and Center.

D.J. is a tall, big-boned girl and a gifted athlete from a family of gifted athletes, but her family is not known for its communication skills. They aren't stupid, they're just not talkers. Her two older brothers are talented college football players. Her younger brother is athletic, too, though he talks so little that his teachers worry about him. In Dairy Queen, the coach of a rival high school sends his spoiled rich-boy quarterback to help out on the Schwenk farm, where D.J. is doing all of the work alone because her father has broken his hip. D.J. ends up coaching Brian Nelson in football, while he coaches her on the advantages of talking more. In The Off Season, D.J. plays high school football, and she and Brian begin to get closer. But D.J. realizes that Brian is ashamed to be seen in public with her. A lot of other things go wrong, but none of them seem to matter much when D.J.'s older brother Win suffers a very serious injury playing football. She drops everything to stand by him, coaching and cajoling him through rehab.

In this third book, Front and Center, we find that although D.J. has learned to open up more thanks to her now-defunct relationship with Brian, she is still not the type to take center stage. As she returns to playing high school basketball, she realizes that's exactly what her coach expects her to do: become a leader for the team. Heavily recruited by college basketball coaches, D.J. finds that everyone around her is pushing her to verbally commit to playing Big Ten college ball. But she pulls back, afraid she can't take the pressure. Meanwhile, she is dating her buddy Beaner, although she still finds herself thinking about Brian Nelson. Even as D.J. leans toward playing for a smaller college team, life and the people who care about her conspire to convince her that she's got too much going for her to settle for less--whether in dating or in basketball.

I cannot emphasize enough how authentic D.J.'s narrative voice is. Sometimes in YA, we meet an endless parade of main characters who seem to be channeling terribly clever urban 30-somethings with their banter and sarcasm. In contrast, D.J. is such a fresh combination of ordinary and extraordinary, the way real girls are, the ones you walk past every day. Listen to her frank and slightly funny voice at the beginning of Front and Center, when she mistakenly thinks she's going to able to stay out of the limelight and avoid trouble, including boys:

"But most of all--and this is what I was looking forward to the very, very most--I was done with all that boyfriend crap. Finished with the 24/7 Brian Nelson cable station that had been running nonstop inside my skull since July. No more feeling like I was some fluttery girl who doesn't have anything better to do all day long than think about her boyfriend. Because I did have better things to think about, thank you very much, because I am not the kind of girl who has boyfriends; I'm the kind who's just friends with boys, which is totally different and which I'm actually kind of good at. I'd pulled the plug on that Brian Nelson cable station for good.

That's why it felt so nice to be getting back to school. Because after five months I was back to being plain old background D.J. That's how I thought about it, anyway. In photographs of course I'm always in the background--it's a family joke, actually, that us Schwenk kids could go to school naked on picture day because we're all so crazy tall. But I mean that I was returning to the background of life. Where no one would really notice me or talk about me or even talk to me much except to say 'Nice shot,' and I could just hang out without too many worries at all."

It's a real gift to be able to watch D.J. struggle to grow into herself in Dairy Queen, The Off Season, and now Front and Center. Catherine Murdock is so adept that she even manages to let us know that D.J. will probably end up being an incredible basketball coach in ten or fifteen years. But this and other messages, such as the cow metaphor used so well in Dairy Queen, never call unnecessary attention to themselves. Which reminds me of D.J.'s own self-effacing style. Even so, D.J., the messages, and these three books still manage to shine. Read them, please. You will be very glad you got to know D.J. Schenk.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Likable Lead Character, September 13, 2009

By	Ken C. (MA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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DJ Schwenk, the likable lead in the DAIRY QUEEN trilogy anchored by this new release, is the type of girl anyone would love to call a daughter, sister, friend, student, or player. Well-rounded, intelligent, diligent, helpful, caring, athletic -- DJ has it all. This book lacks the freshness of the first, where readers were treated to a Wisconsin dairy farmer's daughter who had the gumption not only to play boys' football in high school, but to fall in love with the arch-rival school's quarterback. It also gets off to a slow start. But eventually, FRONT AND CENTER rights itself and closes strong and suitably, ending Catherine Gilbert Murdock's trilogy in a manner that should more than satisfy fans of the first two books.

FRONT AND CENTER's chief narrative concerns are DJ's love life and her college choice. She starts to see a clownish boy named Beaner because Beaner makes her happy and helps her forget Brian. But then Brian re-enters the picture, and it's hard to forget a boy when he keeps showing up in your kitchen, your barn, and your thoughts night and day. Meantime, the Division I colleges are aggressively courting DJ due to her basketball prowess. Trouble is, thoughts of playing on a big stage make her stomach ill. She's convinced that she'd rather be a big fish in a Division III bowl.

Despite the sluggish start and plot devices (see above) that are not exactly bracing, character carries the day. Murdock also uses humor to her advantage. For example, in a discussion between DJ and Brian about playing D-I ball, we have this exchange:

"Do you know how many people watch D-I? I'd barf my guts out if I had to do that."

"That's not a good reason not to do it, though."

"Yeah, it is! People can die from barfing, like that thing you get when you're pregnant and you throw up so much that you die..."

"No one dies from barfing, not anymore. They have IVs now and stuff."

"Like I'm going to go out on the court with an IV."

"Huh... Would knocking over an IV pole be considered an offensive foul?"

"Oh, totally. But you could use the pole to set one heck of a screen -- "

"Uh-uh. Six inches max between player and pole."

This dialogue typifies the light spirit of the book. Overall, if you've read the first two books, you may find this weaker but should still enjoy it for that "loose strings pulled together" feeling. And if you haven't read any of Murdock's stuff, by all means go back and read DAIRY QUEEN. It's as fun and wholesome as a tall glass of milk.

3.0 out of 5 stars A Satisfying End to This Trilogy, November 5, 2009

By	Stacey @ Tree, Root, and Twig (Houston Metro, TX) - See all my reviews

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One of the things I appreciate most about this trilogy that began with Murdock's "Dairy Queen" is that the author picks up the subsequent books right where we left off, making it as seamless as possible.

"Front and Center" is no different, although I have to admit, DJ's voice - at first - *is* a little different. Somehow she comes off much whinier in the beginning of this book, full of self-doubt and doom-and-gloom. It was tough for me to get through the first 50 pages or so because of the rampant teen angst, but after a while it felt like good ol' DJ again, and I settled in.

It's not an insult to say that this book, like the other two in the series, isn't a real complicated piece of fiction. It's a pretty simply storyline, the characters are straightforward, there's nothing here to rock any boats or establish new themes in literature. But that's ok, because sometimes simple is nice, and sometimes becoming engrossed in a character's voice - which is definitely true of Murdock's DJ Schwenck - is the best kind of pay-off for investing your time in a book.

I also love this whole series because I think it's totally appropriate for young teens. I've read way too much YA fiction that I wouldn't even hand to my 15yo. This series, however, focuses on character and growth, and while there is some "making out" and some teenage drinking depicted, everything is kept to a minimum, and there's no language to contend with. All around, I've really enjoyed this series, and "Front and Center" is a great way to end the story of dairy-farmer-turned-sports-star DJ Schwenk.