One Crazy Summer

Title: One Crazy Summer
Author: Rita Williams-Garcia
Genre: Historical Fiction
Award: Coretta Scott King

One Crazy Summer is a story of three sisters that go to Oakland, California to visit their mother during the summer the year of 1968. The three girls names are Delphine, Vonetta and Fern. Since the girls mother, Cecile left them seven years ago to live a "more radical" life in California, evelen year old Delphine has taken the mother figure position for the other girls.

This book goes on about the girls going to Oakland for the summer and basically the troubles they had to go through just to spend the summer with their mother, who was also working with the Black Panthers, which is where she decided to make the three girls go to camp for the summer.

It was clear that the mother did not want the girls even after seven years. However, the girls were determined and they stayed and learned so much during their CRAZY summer!!

I would love to read this to a fifth grade classroom, because the girls are all around the age of fifth graders and I believe they could find a way to relate easier. I would use this book to teach about how different the world is now, compared to 60 years ago when african americans were looked at differently. This book can give a huge history lesson about the changes in the world over the years on the topic of racism.