One Crazy Summer has been honored with numerous awards - it was a Newbery Honor recepient, a Coretta Scott King winner, and the Scott O'Dell award for historical fiction to name a few. I really enjoyed this book - a lot! Three young girls - the oldest being just eleven- are put on a plane to Oakland, California. Their father thinks it is time that they see their mother. Delphine, the oldest, is really the only one with any memory of their mother. It's frightening to think that children travel on their own, but they do. What makes this especially frightening to me is that this was in the summer of 1968 and these girls were African American. Our country was in turmoil at that time and I can't imagine how scared this girls must have been.
They land safely and are picked up at the airport by their mother. Cecile is really a mother in name only. She didn't send for the girls and she didn't want them there. So, as Delphine always has, she set to mothering the children. Getting their "take-out" supper each night and going to the center every morning for free breakfast. The center is run by the Black Panthers - which adds to the plot greatly. Their mom is arrested while they are there and a neighbor takes them in for a while. This was a great read for a rainy Saturday afternoon. This book would be a great book in our school library as there are many, many students that can relate to the situation that these girls are in. We learn a little history behind Cecile and her reasons for leaving her very own girls. The reasons don't justsify their abandonment, but it just goes to prove that we really don't know what other people have gone through. We all have some sort of cross to bear.
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