Surely Great: P.S. Be Eleven Review

When I first heard there was to be a sequel to the wonderful One Crazy Summer, I squealed, just like Vonetta is wont to do. It is one of the most highly decorated middle grade titles of the last ten years and deservedly so. To see why I loved this book so much, click here.

P.S. Be Eleven begins on the plane, when Delphine, Fern and Vonetta are returning home to New York after spending ‘one crazy summer’ with their free-spirited activist mother. But one can never come home again, as Delphine discovers that things have changed in her absence over the summer. Delphine is surprised to find that her beloved father has a girlfriend and can’t make heads or tails of her uncle’s strange behaviour.

This book is as close to bottled adolescence as you can get. Delphine’s instant love for The Jackson Five and her unmitigated glee when they come on the radio is so charming and realistic I can barely stand it. I want to reach through the pages and squeeze her cheeks. Just as authentic is her distrust of Miss Marva Hendrix, her father’s love interest, and her deep love but disappointment in her loved Uncle Darnell who is back from Vietnam and not the man he was before.

The classroom scenes are my favourite. They are vividly and hilariously rendered. Group dynamics, especially among children, can be extremely hard to convey but RWC does this with ease. It helps that every single student and their teacher have such distinct personalities, even in the brief, shining glimpses we get of them.

While in no way a history lesson, Rita Williams-Garcia* is able to bring history to life through vivid, imperfect but lovable characters who readers can relate to, despite having little (or no) historical context. Fiction is a great means to learn history. Case in point, I have read exactly one work of nonfiction on WWII but have read innumerable fictional novels set in the era. Williams-Garcia touches on Vietnam, civil rights, racism, drugs, poverty and feminism without ever straying from Delphine’s hilarious and unforgettable voice.

P.S. Be Eleven can be read as a standalone, but do yourself a favour and read One Crazy Summer first. One can never have enough Delphine in her life. Fans of Susin Nielsen, Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Gordon Korman and my books (ahem) will love reading about these unforgettable sisters.

P.S. Be Eleven is available in hard cover from HarperCollins.

*Rita Williams-Garcia is all kinds of awesome. Check out this great Q&A from the Indigo Kids Blog.

Crazy Good: One Crazy Summer

You can barely see the cover of this book underneath all of those award stickers. One Crazy Summer has won or been given the honour book status for almost every award it was eligible for, and with good reason. Rita Williams-Garcia has blended a unique history lesson with a family story and delivered it all in the pitch-perfect voice of her eleven year old narrator, Delphine.

1968. Delphine lives with her Daddy and Grandmother, Big Ma, in New York. Ever since her mother Cecile took off to be a poet, she has taken care of her sisters, Vonetta (all show and crow) and Fern (always accompnaied by her doll, Miss Patty Cake). She is none to pleased to be spending the summer with crazy Cecile in Oakland, especially when it is clear that Cecile can’t be bothered speaking to her own children, let alone feeding or entertaining them. Instead, the girls spend their days at a community centre run by members of the Black Panthers, learning about their rights. But even after weeks of self sufficiency and good behaviour, Cecile, who goes by Nzila now, does not seem to be warming to her daughters. Why are the girls not allowed in her kitchen? Who are the people coming and going at all hours of the day?

I love Delphine- responsible, no-nonsense, lovable Delphine. Her voice is so real to me that days after finishing the novel I can still hear it in my head. Part of what makes her so memorable is her cadence and diction, which is child-like but also artfully crafted. It reminded me a bit of Salamanca in Walk Two Moons, who remains one of my all-time favourite narrators in children’s lit. Both Delphine and Salamanca are quintessential middle grade characters, teetering at the edge of childish naivete and yet also wise-beyond-their-years.

Williams-Garcia manages to address hard, emotional material (absentee mother, racism, the volatile civil rights movement in the late 1960s) in a way that is neither threatening nor heavy-handed. Her message is not political, though there are lots of things to be learned about the politics of the day. Readers will be fascinated to learn about the civil rights movement and the Black Panthers, and skeptical Delphine is the perfect guide for this territory, which is probably unfamiliar to many Canadian children.

One Crazy Summer is available now in hardcover from Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins.