My love for children’s books began – wait for it – when I was a child myself. Of course, when I learned to read I reached for those books that I could easily enjoy at first and then I slowly climbed the ladder to “harder” books. But I never left the love of those “softer” books behind. After all, my basic criteria for what I want to read is a good story, one where I can maybe learn something about the human story, about history (or “her-story”) and about ways to use the language. And there are many picture, middle grade (MG) and young adult (YA) that fit that bill.
When I first read the book The Happiness Project, I felt vindicated in my unabashed love of children’s literature when Gretchen Rubin expressed her habit of returning again and again to the books of her childhood to re-read – for comfort, for enjoyment and to learn something new each time about the book, the writing or herself. She even started not one, but two book clubs, centered on reading such books because she discovered that, once confessed, she was not alone in in her quirky affection and therefore needed two groups to hold all those as secretly passionate as her.
During our homeschooling season, we once went to a conference where an educator discussed the merits of using children’s books, not just for children, but for adults, too, as launching pads into a new subject. If you want to learn about how airplanes work – because I sincerely don’t understand such magic, do you? – you should go to the library and find a children’s book about it. And maybe, that might be all you need. Oh sure, I could ask Wikipedia or the Google, but it often doesn’t engage me the same way. I can still picture the illustrations of Wilbur and Orville Wright from the Children’s Encyclopedia that I read from our basement library as a kid (Volume A: because that was the free incentive to buy the set). And while I may not remember the mechanics of flight, I know that the Orville Bros. of Kitty Hawk did and they were persistent enough to make it happen.
I didn’t pick up One Crazy Summer because I wanted to know more about the summer of 1968 in Oakland, California or about the Black Panthers or because it was a “black book”. I picked it because it was on the Newbery Medal and Honor List, which is awarded to exceptional MG and YA books and, again and again, I have learned that the Newbery Committee (usually) knows what they are doing. That being said, after visiting the King Center in Atlanta in the fall of 2016, I found my knowledge sorely lacking for what went on in the sixties with the Black Panthers and the other side of the coin, Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent protests.
Without context, we often assign judgement to acts of violence or protest. One Crazy Summer gives that context, with its story of the three Gaither sisters who travel from Brooklyn to Oakland one (crazy) summer to live with the mother who abandoned them when Delphine, the oldest, was five. Told in her voice, Delphine is a classic oldest child, a protective rule-keeper, a paradigm that Cecile, their mother does not fall into. Arriving in Oakland, it is not the happy reunion that the girls maybe hoped for, with Delphine resigning: “I was happy to be there and that had to be good enough.” In the way of their mother’s working routine, the girls are sent to a day camp run by the Black Panthers where they learn about Malcolm X and color protest posters that demanded “FREE HUEY”.
Over the course of the (crazy) summer and the course of the book, Delphine, Vonetta and Fern do learn more about their mother, a poet, and what she stands for, in the author’s masterful “show-don’t-tell” way. At the end of the summer, Delphine has a completely new paradigm in which to view her mother and a promise of a relationship going forward – which you can visit in the sequels P. S. Be Eleven and Gone Crazy in Alabama.
