Delphine (11) and her two younger sisters, Vonetta (9) and Fern (7), have flown across the country to Oakland, CA, to spend a month with their mother. Cecile abandoned them shortly after Fern was born, and Delphine is determined to get to know the woman who abandoned them. What she and her sisters get instead, though, is an education: it's the summer of 1968, and Cecile--also known as the black poet Nzila--sends the girls to a Blank Panther summer camp to get them out of her house. 
 I don't really know what to make of this. I was fascinated by the family dynamic--if Cecile didn't want the girls to come (as she reminds them), how did she get bullied into it? Why does she so desperately not want them around? The civil rights/Black Panthers plot is huge and I can see this book being great in a school curriculum, but there's very little background given to the reader. This is a book that needs to be taught, not merely read, unfortunately.