Module 6: One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia

Summary: It's 1968, and Delphine and her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, are headed to Oakland to spend the summer with their estranged mother, Cecile. Expecting trips to Disneyland and days at the beach, the girls instead find in their mother a prickly, distant poet, who refuses to let them use the kitchen and sends them to spend their days at day camp held by the local chapter of the Black Panthers. Until now, Delphine has heard the Black Panthers described as radicals and revolutionaries, but at the day camp she learns of the work they do for their communities, and she and her sisters become involved in a rally to free the Panthers' founder, Huey Lewis. The girls also learn more about their mother, and why she left them back in New York.

Reference: Williams-Garcia, R. (2010) One Crazy Summer. New York, NY: HarperCollins Children's Books.

Impressions: Garcia won a variety of awards for this book, and I can see why. I found it equally entertaining and informative. I enjoyed the characters of all three girls, and Delphine's voice is confident and well-developed; I loved following along as she navigates her relationship with her mother, her sisters, and the people she meets at the community center. Even today, the Black Panthers are portrayed primarily as violent radicals, and little attention is given to services they performed within black communities, like providing free breakfast, child care, and anemia tests, so I enjoyed learning, along with Delphine, about these other aspects of the Panthers' activities. I also think Garcia-Williams did a great job of communicating the energy and atmosphere of Oakland in 1968, at the height of the Civil Rights movement. I look forward to reading the sequel, P.S. Be Eleven.

Review: It is 1968, and three black sisters from Brooklyn have been put on a California-bound plane by their father to spend a month with their mother, a poet who ran off years before and is living in Oakland. It's the summer after Black Panther founder Huey Newton was jailed and member Bobby Hutton was gunned down trying to surrender to the Oakland police, and there are men in berets shouting "Black Power" on the news. Delphine, 11, remembers her mother, but after years of separation she's more apt to believe what her grandmother has said about her, that Cecile is a selfish, crazy woman who sleeps on the street. At least Cecile lives in a real house, but she reacts to her daughters' arrival without warmth or even curiosity. Instead, she sends the girls to eat breakfast at a center run by the Black Panther Party and tells them to stay out as long as they can so that she can work on her poetry. Over the course of the next four weeks, Delphine and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, spend a lot of time learning about revolution and staying out of their mother's way. Emotionally challenging and beautifully written, this book immerses readers in a time and place and raises difficult questions of cultural and ethnic identity and personal responsibility. With memorable characters (all three girls have engaging, strong voices) and a powerful story, this is a book well worth reading and rereading.

Markson, T. (2010). One Crazy Summer [book review]. School Library Journal, 56(3), 170.

Suggested Use: This  historical novel would be a great read for middle-school students learning about Civil Rights and other political movements. While I think it would be good anytime, and that books about black history should be promoted at beyond national Black History month, this book gives such a strong impression and flavor of a tumultuous time in Civil Rights history that I think it would be a great featured book for Black History month. I would give a book talk directly to a middle school social studies or history class about One Crazy Summer; I think it would be a valuable supplement to the curriculum.