True Believer (Make Lemonade #2)

True Believer is a young adult novel by Virginia Euwer Wolff and the second book about LaVaughn, who first appeared in Make Lemonade. Now fifteen and starting tenth grade, LaVaughn lives with her mother in a poor city neighborhood where guns and danger are part of everyday life. She is determined to do well in school and make a better life for herself. As the year unfolds, her longtime best friends, Myrtle and Annie, join a strict religious club and begin to drift away from her, while LaVaughn falls in love for the first time and works through the confusion of growing up. Told in LaVaughn's own voice in short, rhythmic lines, the novel is about friendship, faith, first love and the hard work of building a future. It won the 2001 National Book Award for Young People's Literature.