One crazy summer

MOTHERS. Can't live with them. Can't live without them. Yet 11-year-old Delphine and her younger sisters Vonetta and Fern have done just fine without theirs. Cecile, a poet, walked out on them just after Fern was born. Now, in the summer of 1968, their father, with the reluctant agreement of their grandmother, has decided that the three girls need to leave their Brooklyn home to spend a few weeks with their mother in Oakland, Calif., to get to know her. Turns out she doesn't want to get to know them. After barely acknowledging them at the airport, Cecile brusquely takes them to her sparsely furnished stucco house; sends them to pick up a Chinese take-out dinner, which they eat on the floor; and then pretty much ignores them. The next day, wanting them out of her way, she directs them to the Black Panther People's Center. "Can't miss it. Nothing but black folks in black clothes rapping revolution and a line of hungry black kids." The girls are shocked; their mother is sending them on their own to a bunch of militant strangers? However, they need breakfast, so they find their way to the center, where they meet and learn about the Black Panthers, make friends and, as the summer goes on, contribute their own part to the movement. Surprising though it may be to those old enough to remember 1968, this is a work of historical fiction. The author - a National Book Award finalist for her young adult novel "Jumped" - is also old enough to remember, and she skillfully slips in wry period touches like Delphine's beloved Timex watch, "The Mike Douglas Show" on television and the picture - on the classroom wall at the People's Center - of Huey Newton "sitting in a big wicker chair with a rifle at his side." The story is tightly centered around the three sisters. In spare, poetic prose Williams-Garcia layers nuanced descriptions and brief, evocative scenes to create three utterly distinctive characters - Fern, the youngest, looking out a bus window and singing to herself; the usually brazen Vonetta freezing up with stage fright at a rally; and the stoic Delphine remembering her mother before she left them. "Papa didn't keep any pictures of Cecile, but I had a sense of her. Fuzzy flashes of her always came and went." THE only one of the three old enough to have memories, it is Delphine who tells their tale. Acting older than her age, she fusses over Vonetta and Fern, seeing they eat properly, reading them bedtime stories, filling in for the mother they never knew. But by the end of their visit that mother has, in spite of herself, begun to know her daughters, and wisely advises her oldest, "Be 11, Delphine. Be 11 while you can." In "One Crazy Summer" Williams-Garcia presents a child's-eye view of the Black Panther movement within a powerful and affecting story of sisterhood and motherhood. Monica Edinger, a teacher at the Dalton School in New York City, writes the blog Educating Alice.

Set in the tumultuous summer of 1968, Rita Williams-Garcia's splendid Newbery Honor-winning novel (Amistad, 2010) starts off with Delphine and her sisters visiting their mother, who abandoned them years earlier to pursue poetry. When they arrive at her house in a poor, mostly black neighborhood in Oakland, CA, their mother constantly mutters, "didn't want you to come." The sisters are soon fobbed off on the local Black Panthers' community center, where they learn that the group's primary mission is to serve the community and protect the rights of African Americans. Narrator Sisi Aisha Johnson infuses each character with a distinct personality and her tone of voice is upbeat and often humorous. This is storytelling at its finest. (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.