One Crazy Summer

Rita Williams-Garcia views the Black Panthers, in the award-winning story, One Crazy Summer, through the eyes of Delphine (11), sent to Oakland, California with her younger sisters, Vonetta (9) and Fern(7) to visit their mother, for the first time, whom abandoned them in Brooklyn to be taken care of by their Southern grandma and father, when Fern was just a newborn.  When they arrive to Oakland, extra responsible Delphine and her sisters are sent to a Black Panther’s summer camp for children.  There, they receive a radical education that gets the girls thinking about their lives in a different light.  Delphine tells this historical novel/memoir in a matter-of-fact way that when she does show emotion the reader really feels it.  This book would make an excellent addition to a text set about the Civil Rights Movement or for children, ages 9 and up, who may have a difficult home life. The bond that grows between these sisters will have the reader reflecting on their own relationship with their brothers and/or sisters as the book sucks you in and will not let you out until you have finished.  Lily Woll