One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Eleven-year-old protagonist/narrator Delphine travels with her two younger sisters from Brooklyn, NY to Oakland, CA to meet the mother who abandoned them and spend 28 days with her. Delphine has always been the one to take charge (e.g. getting Chinese take-out for her sisters until they can’t handle it anymore and starts getting groceries and cooking real dinners). She discovers her mother didn’t send for the girls and doesn’t want them in her house, especially her kitchen. She sends the girls to the Center down the street for breakfast daily, and they stay for the summer camp activities. As they spend more time with people like Crazy Kelvin and Sister Pat, they learn about the Black Panthers movement and become involved in a rally, even though they “didn’t come for a revolution but for breakfast.” Will the three girls ever bond with their poem-writing mother? Will they become junior Black Panthers?
“One Crazy Summer” has won the Coretta Scott King award and the Newbery Honor award, out of many awards and general praise in the #kidlit book world. I feel this book would be enjoyable for children wanting to know about the 1960s African American perspective and would be helpful for those dealing with parental abandonment.
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Here’s a screenshot of my #BookSnaps from Instagram on this title; the author commented on it, since I tagged her in it!
feel like I’m almost starting over again with “Read+Learn=Grow!”. The past year and a half (at least) has been both a whirlwind and excruciatingly slow; from moving into a new position mid-year in September 2019 since I’d left my home state the previous June to learning how to teach/juggle/manage two elementary libraries’ K-5 patrons and collections simultaneously to schools shutting down in March 2020 due to Covid-19 and going completely virtual, it’s been quite an [interesting/unusual/trying/sort of exciting, etc.] time. Pick an adjective to describe what all has been happening which made my blogging hiatus happen. It wasn’t really intentional; I felt very bad thinking about all that I was experiencing with going completely digital in the Library via Seesaw (when I was working with students both online and in-person), the ideas from the new lessons my colleagues and I were creating, the reflections on doing Zoom read-alouds with classes and making #BookVideosEDU and all the learning happening in the many meetings with my colleagues that you, reader, weren’t getting an inkling of, since my blog was silent and stagnant.
what I’m going to learn about Accessit as a library collection management platform since my district dumped Follett Destiny, reviews and #BookSnaps of recently read “kidlit,” notes on my genre-fication journey, links to read-aloud #BookVideosEDU, and probably lots more as I get back into the swing of blogging regularly. I leave you with the following quote, which Goodreads quickly provided to my query of quotes about “starting over.”
naps. I use my personal smartphone to create the Book Snaps. The Bitmoji images are integrated into the Snapchat sticker/emoji collection without my phone it asking for all the scary permissions that Snapchat wanted access to on my iPad. So… I’m working with a smaller screen, but I can still make fun (and awesome, if I do say so myself) Book Snaps.
