First published 2021
Eleven-year-old Delphine steps off the plane in Oakland with her younger sisters Vonetta and Fern, ready to spend summer 1968 with Cecile, the mother who walked out on them seven years earlier. Cecile greets them with cold indifference. She feeds them Chinese takeout, bars them from her kitchen, and refuses to explain the mysterious visitors in black berets who appear at her door. Instead of bonding with her daughters, Cecile ships them off to a Black Panther summer camp each day. At the camp, the three Brooklyn girls encounter ideas about revolution and black pride that challenge everything they thought they knew. Delphine struggles to protect her sisters while trying to understand why their mother abandoned them and why she remains so distant now. As the summer unfolds against the backdrop of a turbulent year in American history, the sisters must navigate their complicated feelings about the woman they desperately want to love them back.
Genres: american-fiction, 20th-century, african-american, coming-of-age
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, found-family
Setting: Oakland, Brooklyn
Period: 1968
218 pages · Paperback · Amistad