One Crazy Summer
by Rita Williams-Garcia
Corretta Scott King Honor
This was a story about an eleven year old little girl that had, what I would consider, a pretty tough life. Her mother had left her and her two sisters when she was small and she lived with her father and his mother. They did the best they could with the three girls, but she still felt sad that her mother left them. One summer the girls father decided to send them to California to spend the summer with their mother. Not only was it scary for them to travel from Brooklyn to California on their own to meet someone they didn't really know, but the time period made it even scarier for them because they were black. The story took place in the summer of 1968. They were faced with a lot of stares, hippies, and even black panthers that summer. The book does a great job of describing the situations and the feelings of the girls. There were many situations where the oldest daughter, Delphine, the main character, had to do things and think the way an adult would normally. I think this would be a good book to recommend to a reader in the seventh or eight grade. I enjoyed this story and would think it would also be a good book to use as a read aloud in fifth or sixth. I probably wouldn't have many fifth or sixth graders read it on their own because they may have a lot of questions about the things the girls face and go through. It would definitely be good to have many conversations while reading this book.
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