Then
I found this one through the Scholastic book fair — it had a cover that looked ordinary and turned out to be anything but. Juice’s family is poor in a way I hadn’t read about directly before: their house is being taken, her father can’t find work, her mother is having another baby. Juice herself is hiding her illiteracy at school by being the kid who never causes trouble.
I didn’t have the language for “quiet devastation” at nine but I felt it. I read it twice that week.
Now
Karen Hesse was doing something careful here. Juice’s voice is first-person and present-tense, and it’s restricted entirely to what Juice understands — which means the reader pieces together more than she does. You understand why the notices keep coming before she does. You understand what her father’s situation means before she does.
That gap between what the reader knows and what Juice knows is where the emotion lives. It’s a sophisticated technique deployed invisibly, in a book shelved for nine-year-olds.
Hesse won the Newbery for Out of the Dust the same year this came out. Just Juice is shorter and quieter but it’s doing similar work. One of the ones I’m glad I found again.