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!
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.