Sisters, Black Panthers, and One Crazy Summer

Newbery Honor novel One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia tells a story set in 1968 of three sisters who travel from Brooklyn, New York, to Oakland, California, to visit their mother.  Published in 2010 by HarperCollins, this book also is a National Book Award Finalist, a winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and a Coretta Scott King Award winner.  This emotional tale for readers in grades 3-7 is narrated by eleven-year-old Delphine, who, at the beginning of the novel, is on an airplane with her younger sisters Vonetta and Fern, making their way across the country to see Cecile, the girls’ mother who abandoned them years before.  Their California dreaming of “riding wild waves on surfboards, picking oranges and apples off fruit trees, filling our autograph books with signatures from movie stars we’d see in soda shops” does not turn out to be the reality of their summer, as Cecile sends them to a Black Panther day camp instead.  Whether read as part of a school curriculum or simply for enjoyment, readers are sure to be drawn into this equal parts heartbreaking and beautiful story of culture, family, and identity.