Slacks for Ella Funt

The heroine of this book isn’t the kind of girl who usually stars in YA novels—she doesn’t like to read, she does manual labor, and she doesn’t spend all her time thinking about boys. D.J. does most of the work on her family’s dairy farm after her father gets hurt. It’s a lot of work, more than most teenagers could imagine taking on. She’d never really talked to anyone, not even her family or her best friend. As the characters learn to talk to each other, she learns surprising things about everyone, including herself. Concerned about being no different than the cows in her obedience to expectations, D.J. decides on football, first by training the local opposing team’s quarterback and then by trying out for the local team herself.