6 Stars"It is 1968, and three black sisters from Brooklyn have been put on a California-bound plane by their father to spend a month with their mother, a poet who ran off years before and is living in Oakland. It's the summer after Black Panther founder Huey Newton was jailed and member Bobby Hutton was gunned down trying to surrender to the Oakland police, and there are men in berets shouting "Black Power" on the news. Delphine, 11, remembers her mother, but after years of separation she's more apt to believe what her grandmother has said about her, that Cecile is a selfish, crazy woman who sleeps on the street. At least Cecile lives in a real house, but she reacts to her daughters' arrival without warmth or even curiosity. Instead, she sends the girls to eat breakfast at a center run by the Black Panther Party and tells them to stay out as long as they can so that she can work on her poetry. Over the course of the next four weeks, Delphine and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, spend a lot of time learning about revolution and staying out of their mother's way."(taken from Amazon.com)
My Review: I made a goal to read all the Newberry Honor books for 2011 and this was the one I started with. This story was sad and funny and had me laughing and crying. I enjoyed it even though it deals with what some may consider an uncomfortable subject. When I was in school, we learned that the Black Panthers were bad and Martin Luther King Jr was good (at least that was the impression my teachers gave us). I never realized how much good the Black Panthers did in communities, although I'm not sure how I felt about how the characters changed at the end of the novel. All in all, I thought it was a great candidate for the Newberry.
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