One Crazy Summer

In the book One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia three sisters are sent to California to spend the summer with their mother who abandoned the family many years before.  The girls' father felt that it was time that they learned about their mother for themselves.  Reading this book brought me back to my own childhood visits with a father I barely knew.  It made me think of the awkwardness and the feeling of not knowing how to act or behave in the presence of a person that you barely know.    I could identify with the mixture of feelings and emotions that you experience when interacting with a parent that has been essentially absent from your life.  Wanting to hate them for not being there,wondering what was more important to them than being a parent, and secretly longing for them to be the parent you always dreamed of.   I remember struggling  to reconcile the fantasies I invented in my mind of what a parent should be and the reality of who the person actually is.  The main character has such and honest and straight forward way of expressing herself.  Garcia put into words thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I have had a million times in my life, but was never able to express.  In the beginning of the story I could not find anything I liked about the character Cecile (the girl's mother).  I thought of her as selfish, cold, and could not fathom why she would leave her children behind.  In the end, I felt real empathy for her.  I ended up viewing her life circumstances as tragic.  Especially because the hardships she had faced made her incapable of being a loving and nurturing mother.  I felt sorry for her that she missed out on being able to experience the unconditional love that only a child can bring.
I thought it was interesting how Rita Williams Garcia used Oakland, CA as the backdrop for the story.  She was able to intertwine the story of a young black girl struggling to learn about her mother with the civil rights movement.   The girls in the story attend a summer program run by the Black Panthers.  In addition to learning about their long lost mother they develop an understanding of the ongoing fight for equality, discrimination, and understanding their own racial identity.