“One Crazy Summer” by Rita Williams-Garcia

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

You know, my son Guthrie is 11 this year.

Can you believe that?

It can’t be possible.

And pretty much the whole time that he’s been alive, I’ve been talking about the books that my wife and I are reading with him and to him in our home, like at bedtime or other times of the day.

And as he’s grown up, the complexity of those books has increased, and the differences between the good guys and the bad guys have become less obvious.

I think a really good example of that kind of complexity that he’s growing into is the book One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia Williams.

Let me set the scenario for you.

There are three young girls living in Brooklyn, New York, Delphine, Veneta, and Fern.

They’re African-American girls who are going to Oakland, California to stay with their mother.

Now, years ago, their mother abandoned them, basically.

And going to California is an opportunity for them to reconnect with her.

But once they get to California, they realize even at the moment that they land at the airport that their mother doesn’t really want to have anything to do with them.

She is a member of the Black Panthers.

She’s fighting a revolution.

She believes in changing the country.

She is trying to right old wrongs.

She is trying to demonstrate black power in a world run by white people.

And these three young girls have to negotiate this new relationship that they’re trying to build with their mother as well as their mother’s relationship with the Black Panthers and the revolution at large.

But here these three girls are with their mother in Oakland, California, and they’re trying to develop this new definition of family.

What is it like to try to have a relationship with somebody who didn’t necessarily want you or didn’t want to be a part of your life?

And the girls, as they figure that out with their mother, Cecile, also figure out this idea of family, which is the three of them, the unit of the three sisters who can depend on each other and are learning about the world together through their own perspectives and running up against these challenges together as a family.

So they have these two interesting interlocking ideas of family that both interlock and are disconnected, which I find very appealing.

And again, that’s the kind of complexity that you wouldn’t find in books, perhaps, that you would read to a five-year-old or a six-year-old.

So the book is One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia Williams.

I would recommend it to kids 18 to maybe 12 or 13.

I think it’s manageable by anyone in that range.

And my son, by the way, my son Guthrie loved the book.

He said it was like living in a corner of history.

He felt that the book was real to him and what these girls were experiencing, he was experiencing as well.

That’s beautiful.

It is.

It’s very well written.

It’s easy to read aloud, which is something that I look for in a book at bedtime.

And there are two more books in the series which we’ve started.

Okay.

Give me that title one more time.

One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia Williams.

Great.

Well, we’ll put a link to that on our website.

And if you’d like to talk about any aspect of language, books you’re reading, or words you’ve come across, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.