One Crazy Summer

Review by Bill Landau

Williams-Garcia, Rita. One Crazy Summer. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.

If you have a soft spot in your heart for little girls, grab a box of tissues before you start reading One Crazy Summer because you’re going to need them. The book will bring laughter, anger, disbelief and likely a few tears along the way.

Williams-Garcia does a fantastic job of combining all the attributes of well-rounded characters and paints the reader a verbal picture of three sisters from Brooklyn. The girls’ father sends them alone to Oakland for a month to get to know Cecile, their estranged birth mother. The girls imagine things every girl would dream about on a trip to California such as visits to Disneyland, meeting movie stars and swimming in the ocean. But when the self-serving and unloving Cecile greets them at the airport, they quickly discover she is nothing like they had built her up in their minds. It does not take long for Delphine, the eldest daughter, to realize that she needs to go into survival mode in order to care of herself and her siblings.

Williams-Garcia makes the reader fall in love with these darling girls by making their appearance, actions, thoughts and dialogue honest and natural. It is this naturalness that gives the book its wings. Capturing believable dialogue is so difficult in any fiction, but the author hits the girls’ race, class and gender right on the head in her portrayal of Delphine, Vonetta and Fern.

Early on, we get a glimpse of what it was like to be a young black girl in 1968. People tried to press small coins into their hands and take their picture like they were some sort of exhibit walking down the street. Delphine, in particular, was always conscious of who they could talk to and who to avoid and ended up herding her younger sisters around obstacles like they were sheep.

Regardless of their Brooklyn class, the girls suddenly become part of the repressed Black Panthers in Oakland and they adapt, with caution. Again, the girls struggle with how to adapt to these huge changes in their lives, but their actions are valid and believable.

Gender-wise, the trio of sisters acts like sisters of any race or class would act together in a tense situation. They fight! It might be tempting to write an idyllic scenario where the three become totally united and persevere as one. But these girls react as real siblings likely would—they fight, they argue, but ultimately, they manage to survive together. And they have lots of fun along the way.

The honesty of their dialogue and actions is especially poignant when the month is over and Cecile takes the girls to the airport for the trip home. It was a trip they will never forget, but are happy to have survived. And yet little Fern is the one to realize they never got what they came across the country to get—a simple hug from their mother. I don’t want to spoil the ending…but would you please pass the tissues?