"This word COLLEGE is in my house / and you have to walk around it in the rooms / like furniture." It's to earn money for college that fourteen-year-old LaVaughn takes a babysitting job working for 17-year-old single mother Jolly after school. Taking care of Jeremy, who's two, and baby Jilly is a huge job, and it's not made any easier by the fact that Jolly's life is barely balanced on the brink of disaster. One night she comes home beaten up. Another night she doesn't come home at all. But even as LaVaughn assumes more and more responsibilty for this small, struggling family, she senses she is gaining something vital from being with all of them, even Jolly, or perhaps especially Jolly. Stunning, provacative prose ("Bathing with Jilly / is like going someplace warm into a tribe / and doing rituals. She decorates my face with suds / and fills the bathroom with cooing sounds nobody but a baby makes, / like she's sending signals / to Martians.") and solid characterizations are combined in this intriguing novel that looks like a narrative poem, but is actually lines of text broken to reflect the rhythm of spoken language. Honor Book, 1993 CCBC Newbery Award Discussion. (Ages 12-16)

Jolly is seventeen. She can't really spell. She doesn't have much of a job. And she has two little kids from two different, absent fathers.

Jolly knows she can't cope with Jilly and Jeremy all by herself. So she posts a notice on the school bulletin board: BABYSITTER NEEDED BAD. No one replies but Verna LaVaughn, who's only fourteen. How much help can she be?

For a while, Jolly, Jilly, Jeremy, and LaVaughn are an extraordinary family. Then LaVaughn takes the first steps toward building her own future, and Jolly begins the longs low process of turning the lemons of her life into lemonade.

Written in sixty-six chapters with text lines that break at natural speaking phrases, this is a startling novel by an extraordinary writer.