One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven by Rita Williams-Garcia
In my continuous adventures of black YA fiction, I discovered these stories that took me back to the childhood of my big brothers and sisters - 1968. I would have been a little younger than the baby sister, Ferm AKA Little Girl AKA Afua and would have been absorbing all the changes happening around me. I would four years old in 1968, the year my mother died, the year the world changed, the year that helped usher in the moving Black Power movements of the 1970s and young people stepping courageously out into the world won through the Civil Rights Movement. One Crazy Summer finds the three sisters - Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern - being sent from their home in BedSty, New York to their barely remembered poet mother in Oakland, Carlifornia. When I first purchased the book for my daughters, I almost put it down because I didn't want them to read stories about an absent mother. I'm glad I overcame my initial reservation and allowed myself to be transported back in time that is