GONE CRAZY IN ALABAMA

The third and last book about the Gaither sisters from Newbery Honor and New York Times bestselling author Rita Williams-Garcia! A companion to the award-winning One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven –and (dare we say it?) the best in the series.

It is the summer of 1969, and Delphine, Vonetta, and Fern are off to Alabama to visit Big Ma and her eighty-two-year-old mother, Ma Charles. Pa cannot remind them enough that the South is not like Brooklyn, and that you cannot get more southern than Alabama.

Across the field, through the pines, and over the creek is the Trotter home, where Ma Charles’s half- sister, Miss Trotter, lives. The two half-sisters have not spoken in years, each determined to hold onto their version of the truth. Dramatic Vonetta plays middle man to the two warring, elderly sisters, while Delphine struggles against her to bring the family together. As Delphine hears about family history that she never knew existed, she learns of a hurt that happened many years ago – a hurt that maybe cannot be mended. But when a tragedy comes to the farm in Alabama, Delphine discovers that the bonds of family run deeper than she ever knew possible.

Powerful and humorous, this companion to the award-winning One Crazy Summer and P.S. Be Eleven stands on its own, as a story that brilliantly reveals the history of an African American family in all its richness and complexity, superbly written by master storyteller Rita Williams-Garcia.

Rita Williams-Garcia’s Newbery Honor-winning novel, One Crazy Summer, was a winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award, a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and a New York Times bestseller. Rita Williams-Garcia lives in Jamaica, New York, is on the faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in the Writing for Children & Young Adults Program, and has two adult daughters, Stephanie and Michelle, and a son-in-law, Adam.