Naomi narrates the story in a voice that is both amusing and touching.Įlements shared with One Crazy Summer: young first-person narrator, abandonment, family life, mothers and daughters, grandmothers, identity, finding family Their journey reveals a great deal about family, identity and belonging. Gram suspects that she wants Naomi only for the welfare check she would bring, so along with her Mexican-American neighbors, Gram takes the children across the border to search for the Mexican father whom Naomi only dimly remembers. But their mother has suddenly reappeared, along with a boyfriend, to reclaim Naomi. Naomi is a shy girl who likes to make wood carvings and collect new words, and under her grandmother's care, she and her brother have recovered from the abuse they suffered at their mother's hands. Lexile level: 830.Įleven-year-old Naomi and her disabled younger brother Owen have lived in a California trailer park with their grandmother since their alcoholic mother abandoned them seven years ago.
An author's note provides additional historical details.Įlements shared with One Crazy Summer: historical novel, young first-person narrator, identity, family life, siblings, African-American experience, civil rights, 1960s politics, 1960s culture, Black Panthers
The novel presents a vivid picture of a family in crisis and a realistic account of the tensions between the nonviolent civil rights movement and black militants in 1968.
Soon he's involved in something far more serious - and more dangerous - than he could have imagined. Although he wants to share his father's belief that people can bring about change without using violence, when Martin Luther King is shot and Sam sees a friend victimized by police brutality, he begins to explore the Panthers with Stick. In 1968 Chicago, fourteen-year-old narrator Sam Childs is caught in a conflict between his activist father's nonviolent approach to civil rights and his older brother and best friend Stick, who has joined the Black Panther Party.
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