P.S. Be Eleven

Starred review from April 15, 2013
Delphine and her sisters return to Brooklyn from visiting their estranged mother, Cecile, a poet who sent them off every day to a camp run by the Black Panthers in Williams-Garcia’s Newbery Honor–winning One Crazy Summer. It wasn’t the California vacation they expected, but the experience rocked their world. Big Ma, their grandmother, is no longer just a stern taskmaster, she’s an oppressor. Delphine, who again narrates, loses interest in magazines like Tiger Beat and Seventeen: “When there’s Afros and black faces on the cover, I’ll buy one,” she tells a storeowner. Reflecting society at large in 1968, change and conflict have the Gaither household in upheaval: Pa has a new girlfriend, Uncle Darnell returns from Vietnam a damaged young man, and the sixth-grade teacher Delphine hoped to get has been replaced by a man from Zambia. Though the plot involves more quotidian events than the first book, the Gaither sisters are an irresistible trio. Williams-Garcia excels at conveying defining moments of American society from their point of view—this is historical fiction that’s as full of heart as it is of heartbreak. Ages 8–12.

In this sequel to the Newbery honor book ONE CRAZY SUMMER, Delphine and her younger sisters are caught between the middle-class mores of their Brooklyn grandmother and the radical views of their mother, a poet in California who sends them missives on the struggle for black power. Narrator Sisi Johnson conveys Delphine's continual dilemmas as the eldest sister who is old beyond her years--hence her mother's constant admonition--"PS Be Eleven." She readily shifts to the younger-sounding voice of the sixth grader who is enraptured by a new band--the Jackson Five. Johnson splendidly conveys the times, capturing the childish enthusiasms of the three girls, the scolding voice of grandmother, and the anguish of an uncle returned from Vietnam. D.P.D. (c) AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine