One Crazy Summer

Thank you Annette Black, for one I've missed.

Williams-Garcia, R. (2010). One crazy summer. New York, NY: Amistad.

One Crazy Summer is a multicultural historical fiction book by Rita Williams-Garcia that has won multiple awards. These awards include Newbery Honor, National Book Award Finalist, Scott O’Dell Award, and the Coretta Scott King Award. This interest level of this book is grades 4-7. It is a delightful yet touching book about three sisters that are sent across the country on an airplane by themselves to spend the summer with their mother that abandoned them when they were very young. The story portrays the power of love and protectiveness among sisters. This is especially evident in Delphine the order sister who is very protective of her younger siblings, Vonetta and Fern. Due to not having a mother growing up, Delphine has learned to take care of her sisters, because she hasn’t been able to rely on a mother to do so. As the story unfolds the reader falls in love with these three young girls that are forced to travel from New York to Oakland California to spend the summer with their mother a stranger to them and who doesn’t want them there. The girls are faced with the realities of life living in the black neighborhood of Oakland, California and meet some interesting characters involved with the Black Panthers and the movement for equality. They learn things about their mother that they never knew and make meet people that will impact the rest of their lives. Will the girls’ mother, Cecile begin to accept the girls as her daughters and show love toward them? How will the involvement with the Black Panthers impact the girls’ lives? Will they survive the summer with their mother and make it back home to New York safely? Read One Crazy Summer, this heart wrenching yet funny tale of three girls experiencing life with a mother that abandoned them.

            This book would be a good book to use for studying episodic plot, because there many underlying story lines going on throughout the book from chapter to chapter. For example you have the relationship between Delphine, her sisters and their mother. There is also the conflict involved with the Black Panthers and the police. The book portrays person-against-person conflict between the girls and their mother and person-against-society conflict with the story of the Black Panthers and the revolutionary camp.

A classroom lesson or activity that could go along with this book is to have the students study characterization by having them compare and contrast how the characters changed from the beginning of the book to the end. This would especially be good for looking at the character of Cecile and how her attitude toward her daughters changed in the book. Another activity that could go along with this book would be to have the students do research and write about the movement of the Black Panthers in the 1960’s.

Big Questions:

• How does the character of Cecile change from the beginning of the story to the end?
• How does spending time with Cecile during the summer change the girls’ attitudes about their mother?
• How does spending time at the revolutionary camp reshape the lives of Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern?

Standards:

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.3: Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character’s thoughts, words, or actions).
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.9: Compare and contrast the treatment of similar themes and topics (e.g., opposition of good and evil) and patterns of events (e.g., the quest) in stories, myths, and traditional literature from different cultures.