D.J. Schwenk is very tall just like everyone else in her family. It is an old joke that the Schwenk kids could go to school naked on picture day and nobody could tell the difference. But this tall girls world is about to turn upside down. The quarter back from the rival high school team has been sent to her house by his coach to get a work ethic. After working him hard on her family farm D.J. and Brian start to get along, and play some football. It turns out D.J. isn’t that bad and she wants to try out for her high school team. But after learning all of Brian’s qwerks on the field will he be okay with her playing against him? Also there is some trouble in D.J.’s house and we are all wondering what her dad has done to make her older brothers not even want to call home anymore.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock wrote this book as D.J.’s journal, but didn’t include the date and such. I like that because I usually find myself skipping over it anyway. Since this is her journal we get to hear all of her thoughts and you can see her grow as a person. The story line wasn’t too complicated, there were never more than a couple things going on at once. I wanted to read this book as fast as possible especially when they were figuring out if D.J. could play football considering she was a girl. The only bad thing I would have to say about Dairy Queen was that the writing was good but nothing amazing. It was supposed to be a teenage girl’s diary though so I wouldn’t count off too much for that. Murdock was able to teach even me something about football like what the different positions were and what they do. She did it without pages upon pages of explanation, she snuck a couple tidbits of information here and there. D.J. was a very relatable character I absolutely loved her by the end of the book. She had her flaws like everyone but too many.





If you are a reader that likes sports and realistic fiction books I would definitely pick this up. Catherine included I little bit of romance but it doesn’t carry the main problem of the story. Dairy Queen and the two other books in the series, The Off Season, and Front and Center were fast reads. I would recommend this series for girls ages 12-16 that want to read a great story about a girl following her heart.