Just Juice (Scholastic Signature)

Great book!!

Our daughter loves this book. It’s helping her learn to read at a third grade level. Same some money and buy it used!

This realistic story of family love, great poverty and the struggle of trying to learn when you have a learning disability is very powerful.

It is an excellent book and one of the few really well written chapter books on the market. A great read for child's. And families alike.

Hesse, Karen. (1998). Just Juice. New York: Scholastic Press. Literary Genre: Realistic Fiction (Chapter Book) The Faulstich family is going through a hard time. Pa has difficulty keeping work and is depressed. Ma is pregnant and has gestational diabetes. Juice is in trouble with the truant officer because she does not go to school as she should. Markey and Charleen (Juice's older sisters) worry about Juice. Juice, Markey, and Charleen pitch in to care for the two little ones, Lulu and Turtle. They barely have enough food to eat, so when Pa gets a letter saying they have to pay taxes or lose their house, he keeps it a secret from Ma. It seems like the Faulstich's are doomed. Can Juice get her family through these hard times and deal with her own secret? Hesse successfully captures the essence of a family's bond and love. Throughout all these hardships, the Faulstich's encourage one another, support each other, and remain hopeful that things will get better. The language has some slang that might stump some young readers in the beginning but it allows the reader to visualize the characters. Hesse also does a nice job of addressing the challenges that people with reading disabilities face in their day-to-day lives. My only criticism is that there is not a sequel.

Great book, good condition

This book is written at a 3rd grade level, and the narrator is 9-years-old, so I'm assuming that is the audience. However, the themes in the book are much too mature for 8 and 9-year-old children. This story about an extremely poor "backwoods" family struggling to survive is touching, and in some ways inspiring for it's family loyalty and warmth. I enjoyed it for the most part, but was rather shocked when near the end of the book the 9-year-old narrator describes being required to unexpectedly deliver her mother's baby in an emergency situation. I admire the girl's courage, but not her description of seeing her mother's "private parts." I wouldn't want my 9-year-old daughter reading that. I think she would be traumatized. (She knows some basics, but we haven't had the full-fledged "talk" yet... that's coming this summer.) Call me old-fashioned. I am. Poor grammar pervades this novel since the narrator and other characters are poorly educated. This can be confusing to a 3rd grader who would not understand that this is not "acceptable" or "normal." Overall, the book is simply too mature for it's intended audience. The subject matter would be more appropriate for junior high school, but the reading level is too low, and the main character would not be interesting to young teens. Unfortunately, that leaves this book in no-man's-land, which is unfortunate because it is a nice story. Age recommendation: 9 and up ONLY if read aloud to the child by a parent and discussed thoroughly.

Good condition.

This book elicited so much discussion from our 10 year old girls group! Most of the girls rated it an 8 1/2 out of 10. It starts a bit slow but really picks up and presents a good understanding of those who have literacy issues and difficulties.