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Tuesday, January 30, 2018

2018 Reading Goals

Update: January


I set out at the beginning of the year,  to read twelve types of books in 2018. This month I decided to start by reading a book that has won a prize for excellence.

 A while back Amazon was offering a great deal on a YA book that had won acclaim, and I downloaded it onto my Kindle.  It has sat in my Kindle library for quite a while.  In scanning my library, I noticed One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia, had won five literary awards: A Newbery Honor Book, Scott O'Delll Award for Historical Fiction, Coretta Scott King Award, ALA Best Fiction For Young Adults and a National Book Award Finalist - a perfect pick for award-winning book.
image from Amazon


One Crazy Summer is actually the first in a series of three books about the Gaither sisters: Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern.  Delphine, the eldest sister, is the narrator and a very responsible one at that.  In true big sister fashion, she takes charge of her siblings as they travel from Brooklyn to Oakland, California to visit their mother who left them soon after Fern, the youngest Gaither sister, was born. Neither Vonetta nor Fern have any memory of their mother, and they have hopes of a tender reunion and visits to glamorous places like Disneyland. Upon arrival they are quickly awoken to reality.  Their mother did not ask to have them visit and is anything but welcoming.  She shoves them daily out the door to fend for themselves at a Black Panther Day Camp for kids.  The year is 1968.

Image from Google


FLASHBACK!  I soon found myself thinking back to my high school and college days- the age of protests and sit-ins. Back then the Black Panther Party was a scary thing to me.  I'm ashamed to admit, I do not know a great deal about it, other than it was not the peaceful Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther King.  But One Crazy Summer led me to learn a little more about it's co-founder Huey Newton and some of the workings of the movement. The historical perspective of this book alone is worth the reading, but the endearing Gaither sisters, especially Delphine, make the reading delightful.

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