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A review by lslanker
One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
5.0
11-year-old Delphine lives with her father, grandmother, and two younger sisters in 1968. Her mother left them years ago when her youngest sister, Fern, was just born. While Delphine has snapshots of memories of her mother, she doesn't remember much about the women. That changes, however, when Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern's father decide that it's time that the girls pay their mother a visit.
After landing in Oakland, California, the sisters do not get the big welcome that they expect. Instead, with utterances of "I didn't ask for you to come", their mother proves to be just the woman that their grandmother warned them about: big, mean, and completely un-motherly. However, over the course of the 28 days they spend with their mother, they join a community center where they learn about an often-forgotten or misrepresented piece of American history - the Black Panther Movement. Through the community center, they learn about their culture and experience a changing relationship with their mother.
Although this book is written for a young audience, it treats its readers as ones who are able to analyze and critique the way that we treat people of all cultures in the United States. It looks at the themes of acceptance, family, love, culture, race in a way that forces the reader to think critically about this part of America's past.
After landing in Oakland, California, the sisters do not get the big welcome that they expect. Instead, with utterances of "I didn't ask for you to come", their mother proves to be just the woman that their grandmother warned them about: big, mean, and completely un-motherly. However, over the course of the 28 days they spend with their mother, they join a community center where they learn about an often-forgotten or misrepresented piece of American history - the Black Panther Movement. Through the community center, they learn about their culture and experience a changing relationship with their mother.
Although this book is written for a young audience, it treats its readers as ones who are able to analyze and critique the way that we treat people of all cultures in the United States. It looks at the themes of acceptance, family, love, culture, race in a way that forces the reader to think critically about this part of America's past.