Rita Williams-Garcia takes the three sisters introduced in her Newbery Honor book, One Crazy Summer, to their paternal grandmother's childhood home in Alabama, and digs deeply into the complexities of race and societal hierarchy during the summer of 1969.
Delphine, Vonetta and Fern are 12, 10 and eight, and they are processing what they are learning at different rates. Delphine knows that what's usual at home in Brooklyn is not so easily tolerated in the Deep South where Big Ma and her mother, Ma Charles, live. Still, it upsets her when her beloved cousin JimmyTrotter ("no space in between") hangs his head and says "yes sir" to Sheriff Charles when they meet him on the street. She discovers just how complicated things can be when she finds out Sheriff Charles runs with the Klan--and that he's kin to Ma Charles. Ma Charles and her half-sister, Miss Trotter, are not on speaking terms, but their conversations with the three sisters reveal how similar they are. Delphine also discovers, at the root of the pair's rivalry, a need to know that each was loved by the father they shared. When a tornado strikes and Vonetta goes missing, the family comes together--every branch of it.
With humor and wisdom, Williams-Garcia layers in the themes of all three books the way that Delphine, Vonetta and Fern "[lay] their voices down," and the cumulative effect is spellbinding. Themes of self-realization, reconciliation and accepting a painful past in order to be whole all culminate in this grand finale. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness