Module 5: One Crazy Summer

Summary:  Delphine, Vonetta and Fern are being forced to spend the summer with their estranged mother Cecile in Oakland, California. It's a summer of unrest in Oakland and Cecile's friendship with members of the Black Panthers puts her and her children in jeopardy. While attending a Black Panther summer camp, Delphine and her sisters begin to learn the reason behind the unrest and begin for form an uneasy bond with their mother. Slowly, Delphine discovers why her mother abandoned them and finds a voice to her anger.

Citation:

Williams-Garcia, R. (2010). One crazy summer. New York: Amistad.

Impressions: I found myself draw into this story from the beginning and even though I knew a little about the Black Panthers, I found seeing them through the eyes of a child to be quite enlightening. Delphine's innocence contrasted with her mother's world weariness in a way that left both characters changed for the better. 

Reviews:
Gr 4-7-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, March). [One Crazy Summer]. School Library Journal, 56(3), 170-170. Retrieved February 19, 2016, from Book Review Digest Plus (H.W. Wilson). 

Library Use: This would be a perfect book to use for African American History Month. The Black Panthers were an important part of history that is often ignored in children's books because they were so controversial. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, I think this book would be a perfect way to bring the history of the black power movement to life in a library program.