One Crazy Summer (Module 6)

Summary
 During the middle of the Civil Rights movement and the height of the Black Panthers, Delphine and her three younger sisters go visit their mother in Oakland, California. The three sisters live with their father and grandmother, Big Ma, in Brooklyn and have never known their mother- she left when the girls were very young. Their mother seems to have no interest in them or their visit- in fact she encourages them to leave everyday. Eventually she starts sending the girls to a Black Panther summer camp, where the three of them make friends a learn a lot about what it means to be a black girl and how to stand up for themselves.

Suggested Activities
This would be a wonderful book to help children with the a deeper understanding of the Civil Rights movement. If the school was doing a decade study, or even certain classes could use it to supplement history lessons. There are so many references to pop-culture at the time and things that could lead to a bigger research project about the movement and The Black Panthers. It would be great to have kids look into the music of the time, books of the time and poetry of the time. They could use One Crazy Summer as a starting point and then explore the pop-culture of the times and present that to fellow classmates. For example the poem "We Real Cool" by Gwen Collins is mentioned in the book. Students could read this and then go find other popular poems from this time period.

Reviews
The titular summer is that of 1968, when Delphine and her little sisters, Vonetta 
and Fern, travel from Brooklyn, where they live with their father and grandmother, 
to Oakland, California, the home of their estranged mother. Once there, they find 
that their mother, Cecile, has renamed herself “Nzila,” that she’s a poet, printing 
on her own kitchen press, and that she has no interest in her visiting kids (“I 
didn’t send for you. Didn’t want you in the first place”). She kicks the kids out 
during the day, sending them off to get breakfast from the Black Panthers at the 
People’s Center, where they decide to stay for the summer camp program. Delphine 
finds some friends there, and she also makes some inroads into connecting with 
her prickly, irascible mother and the cause that she’s supporting. There are occasional contrived moments in the tale, but the characters are compelling enough 
to overcome the flaws. Eleven-year-old Delphine, plain-faced and plain-spoken 
and big-sister capable, is a compelling narrator, and her perspective on the cultural contrasts and shifts is enlightening and credible. She’s coming from a home 
dominated by an Alabama-grown grandmother, who’s determined that the girls 
not make a “grand Negro spectacle” in public, but her stubborn independence and 
inquiring mind echo her mother’s defiant ways and bring her to consider the new 
ideas she’s encountering. This is for younger readers than Magoon’s The Rock and 
the River (BCCB 3/09), also a story of black activism in 1968, and while it’s got 
some details about the Panther movement, it’s even more effective as a portrait of 
a girl whose understanding of both her family and her racial identity is enriched 
by the challenges she faces.
Stevenson, D. (2010). One crazy summer. Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, 63(6), 266. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/223698160?accountid=7113

My Thoughts
 I was surprised by this book in many ways, and how it moved me so much. The story is so heartbreaking, even at the beginning, the story of these three girls who are forced to spend the summer with their mother who doesn't seem to want them in anyway. I just felt like Delphine got the short end of the stick throughout the whole book. She has to protect her sisters from everything- each other, the world and their own mother. And while Delphine and her mother eventually cleared some of their past up- her mother, Cecile, never fully explains her reasons for leaving or shows her full love towards the girls. I wanted it to have a wrapped up, nice, happy ending- and that just didn't happen. Which is more truthful to life, I know, but harder to handle.

I was also surprised by how much I learned from the book. I really thought I knew a lot about the Civil Rights movement as it is something that interests me so much. But I was clueless about the Black Panthers and Huey Newton. I was so happy to see Delphine find herself and learn to stand up for herself in ways. At one point in the novel, Cecile tells Delphine that it would do her good to be MORE selfish. And I feel in some ways, Delphine did learn to do this. She really stood up for herself, and stood her ground in so many ways at the end. Just by going to business to ask them to put up Black Panther flyers in their windows, especially when so many sad no. Delphine will always look after her sisters and be their caregiver, but I felt she learned to balance that with her own needs as the book went on.

Bibliography
Williams-Garcia, R. (2011). One crazy summer. New York, NY: Amistad.