One Crazy Summer

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the past.

When the girls arrive in Oakland in the summer of 1968, Cecile wants nothing to do with them. She makes them eat Chinese takeout dinners, forbids them to enter her kitchen, and never explains the strange visitors with Afros and black berets who knock on her door. Rather than spend time with them, Cecile sends Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern to a summer camp sponsored by a revolutionary group, the Black Panthers, where the girls get a radical new education.

Set during one of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, one crazy summer is the heartbreaking, funny tale of three girls in search of the mother who abandoned them—an unforgettable story told by a distinguished author of books for children and teens, Rita Williams-Garcia.

The New York Times - Monica Edinger

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…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.

Winner of the PEN/Norma Klein Award, Rita Williams-Garcia is the author of five other distinguished novels for young adults: Blue Tights, Every Time a Rainbow Dies, Fast Talk on a Slow Track, Like Sisters on the Homefront, and No Laughter Here, the latter four of which were chosen as ALA Best Books for Young Adults. Like Sisters on the Homefront was also named a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and a best book of the year by ALA Booklist, School Library Journal, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and Publishers Weekly. She has also written an acclaimed novel for middle-grade readers, One Crazy Summer, which the New York Times called "a powerful and affecting story of sisterhood and motherhood."

Rita Williams-Garcia is currently a faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in the Writing for Children and Young Adults Program. She has two daughters, Michelle and Stephanie, and lives in Jamaica, New York.