One Crazy Summer

Title: One Crazy Summer
Author: Rita Williams-Garcia
ISBN: 978-0-06-076088-5
Copyright: 2010

This book actually came out in 2010, the library didn't buy a copy until 2011 when it started getting nominated for numerous awards including:

2011 Coretta Scott King Award Winner

2011 Newbery Honor Book

2011 Scott O'Dell Prize for Historical Fiction

2010 National Book Award Finalist

Normally I don't push award winning books on this blog.  I assume that most people have heard of the books that have won awards.  Usually people who like books have already heard about the "good ones"  but occasionally we all need to make a change and this is mine.  I absolutely adore One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams- Garcia.  I was hooked by page two while describing an airplane ride eleven year old Delphine says "The last thing Pa and Big Ma wanted to hear was how we made a grand Negro spectacle of ourselves thirty thousand feet up in the air around all these white people."  With the words, "A grand Negro Spectacle" I knew that this was going to be a good book.  Vonetta, Fern, and Delphine get sent to live with their mother in Oakland, CA during the summer of 1968.

One Crazy Summer is for all the girls in the world who have a mother who doesn't love them.  Delphine and her sister aren't sure why Pa is making them stay in CA for the summer with their mother Cecile who abandoned the family.  Even more mysterious is what Cecile is doing in the kitchen with all the men with afros, and why suddenly the girls need to spend all their time at a summer camp run by the Black Panthers getting a "real education."

This is an elegantly written story which will leave readers wanting more.  More of Delphine, Vonette, and Fern, and occasionally even more of Cecile and the Panthers.  This book is an excellent introduction to the civil unrest that was taking place in California in the 1960's.