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One Crazy Summer (novel)One Crazy Summer is a historical fiction novel by American author Rita Williams-Garcia, published by Amistad in 2010. The novel is about Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern, three sisters, visiting their mother in Oakland, California, during the summer of 1968.

In the year of its inception, the book was a National Book Award finalist for young people's literature. In 2011 it won the Coretta Scott King Award for its author, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and was a Newbery Medal Honor Book.

Plot
Delphine, aged eleven, Vonetta, nine, and Fern, seven, liveBrooklyn]], New York. However, the girls� father sends them to Oakland, California one summer to stay with their estranged mother, Cecile, who refers to herself as Nzilla. Cecile never calls Fern by her name, but always referring to her as "little girl." This meve what her grandmother has always said to be true�that Cecile abandoned her children because their father objected to her giving the baby the nameood every day and forbidding them to enter her kitchen, which is Cecile's workplace where she run by the Black Panther Party for breakfast and day camp, where they meet Sister Mukumbu. Here the three sisters get taught about the movement, which she explains what the movement does like feeding the poor, helping poor African Americans, and protecting African American communities. The Black Panther member Bobby Hutton has been shot and killed by police, and one of their founding members, Huey Newton, has been wrongfully jailed. The children at the center will soon participate in a rally to protest these injustices.

After a day trip to San Francisco, the sisters return home to find their mother Cecile and two members of the Black Panther Party being arrested. Cecile tells the police she has no children, for she doesn't want the girls to be involved, so the girls pretend to live next door. Soon a friend from the Center, Hirohito, comes for the girls and allows them to stay with him and his mother until Cecile reton, the girls perform a poem their mother wrote, which they found while cleaning the kitchen after her arrest. After their recital, Fern takes the microphone and tells the Black Panthers how she saw one of their most vocal members, ith the police, which gets him in trouble with the party members.

At the rally, the sisters see their mother has been released from jail, and return home with her. Though Delphine and Cecile's relationship remains strained, Cecile tells Delphine how she lost her mother at the age of eleven and had a rough life thereafter. She tries to explain why she left her children, but Delphine is still too young to understand. The next day, the girls return home, after finally hugging their mother.

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