Rita Williams-Garcia
One of my favorite books
One Crazy Summer
included in the
Gaither Sisters Trilogy:
One Crazy Summer,
P.S. Be Eleven,
Gone Crazy in Alabama
is written by Rita.
is like a mother to her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern.
She’s had to be, ever since their mother,
Cecile, left them seven years ago for a radical new life in California.
But when the sisters arrive from Brooklyn
to spend the summer with their mother,
Cecile is nothing like they imagined.
While the girls hope to go to Disneyland
and meet Tinker Bell,
their mother sends them to a day camp
run by the Black Panthers.
Unexpectedly, Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern
learn much about their family,
their country,
and themselves
during one truly
crazy summer.
I have purchased One Crazy Summer hundreds of time for students and teachers alike. The joy of sharing a well loved book!
as they grow up during one of the most tumultuous eras
in recent American history, the 1960s.
Read the adventures of eleven-year-old Delphine
and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern,
as they visit their kin all over the rapidly changing nation—
and as they discover that the bonds of family,
and their own strength,
run deeper than they ever knew possible.
This box set includes One Crazy Summer,
a Newbery Honor book, National Book Award finalist,
and winner of the Scott O’Dell Award;
P.S. Be Eleven; and Gone Crazy in Alabama,
all of which will make the perfect addition
to a young reader’s growing library.
Readers who enjoy Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham
and Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming
will find much to love inthese books.
Rita Williams-Garcia’s books aboutDelphine, Vonetta, and Fern
can also be read alongside nonfiction explorations
of American history
such as Jason Reynolds’s and Ibram X. Kendi’s books.
Fun fact @theblumesaloonpodcast just read and had a weekly podcast on the book One Crazy Summer and did a phenomenal job.
So. When I had the opportunity to read A Sitting in St. James
I was BEYOND excited.
I had just reread One Crazy Summer
for the umpteenth time and was missing Rita’s voice.
A Sitting in St James
did not disappoint.
It’s just a gorgeous lyrical journey,
not to say it’s flowery sweetness,
it’s not.
It is real.
Wonderfully done.
So wonderful,
also, that this is a YA genre book.
I would say 16 years old
and up could read this.
1860, Louisiana. After serving as mistress of Le Petit Cottage for more than six decades, Madame Sylvie Guilbert has decided, in spite of her family’s objections, to sit for a portrait.
While Madame plots her last hurrah, stories that span generations—from the big house to out in the fields—of routine horrors, secrets buried as deep as the family fortune, and the tangled bonds of descendants and enslaved.
Pub date May 21.
