One Crazy Summer

Spent almost the entire day indoors, so I managed to not only read a book today, but also glut myself on crime shows. It was a good day indeed.

Today's book was One Crazy Summer, by Rita Williams-Garcia. The picture I have shows the same cover art on the copy I have (or more precisely, the copy my mother, a fellow teacher, owns, but that I have pilfered from her classroom library), except my copy is covered with FOUR awards. And the awards are: Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, Newbery Honor, Coretta Scott King Award, and National Book Award Finalist. It was also named a best or notable book of the year by just about every organization that has anything to do with children's literature.

And you can see why. Williams-Garcia does a wonderful job of weaving together a personalized family story with historical context. Three sisters -Delphine, the oldest and the story's narrator; Vonetta, her "showy and crowy" sisters; and Fern, the youngest -were abandoned by their mother when they were very young. Now, in the summer of 1968, they are traveling from Brooklyn to Oakland to spend 28 days with their mother for the first time.

Instead of the warm reception they expect, their mother makes clear that they are not wanted there and makes them spend all day at a community center run by the Black Panthers. There, they learn about their rights, and what it means to be black in 1968. In one scene, the girls are asked if they are white or black, since the youngest one, Fern, is holding a blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll. Fern says that she is "colored" so her older sisters go along with it. The Panther asks why she carries "self-hatred around in her arms." They clearly have never considered why her doll is white.

What makes this book great is how the author weaves together the story of the good fight the Panthers are in the middle of with The Man and the good fight the daughters are in the middle of with their mother. At one point, the narrator talks about her mother as being The Establishment.

Once again I found my calm, steady voice and brought our demands to Cecile at our next sit-down dinner. That's what the protesters did. They brought their protest songs and their demands to the Establishment, because the Establishment was in control. The Establishment was someone over thirty year old who had the power. I didn't know Cecile's exact age, but she had to be over thirty. That, plus her holding on to the money Pa had given us, had made Cecile the Establishment. (117)

By drawing a parallel between the two, the author shows multiple layers in the experience of Delphine (primarily, her sisters secondarily) throughout this tumultuous summer.

I am excited to use this book in my classroom. I'd like to use it as a read-aloud with the whole class. This would be especially great to do whole-class close reading of some really interesting sections of the text (and there are many, many sections that beg to be dug into deeply). I'd love to use it as a guided reading book, or to recommend it for independent reading. I could even see it being used as a book to supplement a unit on the Civil Rights Movement, although this would be trickier, since it doesn't have that much information about the Movement. It is good, though, to discuss how the identity issues Blacks were going through at the time. Delphine describes the way her grandmother expects her to behave around white people, then shows how it's different from what the Panthers expect her to do.

All in all, I'm excited to buy this book for myself and add it to my classroom library. Time to get some book talks going!