One Crazy Summer

In the summer of 1968, eleven-year-old Delphine Gaither is sent from Brooklyn to Oakland with her sisters Vonetta, nine, and Fern, seven, to spend a month with Cecile, the mother who left them when Fern was a baby and who now calls herself Nzila. Cecile, a poet and printer, offers no welcome: the girls are fed on Chinese takeout, barred from her kitchen, and shipped off each day to a summer camp at the Black Panthers' People's Center, where they get free breakfast, lessons in Black pride, and a child's-eye education in a movement under siege after the killing of Bobby Hutton and the jailing of Huey Newton. Delphine, the responsible eldest, narrates as caretaker, student, and daughter, and the visit moves toward an arrest, a poetry rally, and a partial understanding between mother and daughters. The novel won a Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Author Award.

Author: Rita Williams-Garcia · Original publisher: Amistad (New York), 2010