Sweet Summer - Softcover

Bebe Moore Campbell is the author of Brothers and Sisters, Singing in the Comeback Choir, and Your Blues Ain't Like Mine. She is a frequent contributor to NPR's "Morning Edition" and is a contributing editor to Essence magazine.

Sweet Summer reverberates with love - the idolatrous reverence of a young girl for the father she sees only during her summers in North Carolina, the complicated passions of an adolescent who becomes aware of her father's failings, the balanced love of a daughter with a husband and a child of her own. It is rich and glowing, full of portraits of Bebe Moore Campbell's father and the men in her life who take his place during the falls, winters, and springs of her childhood in Philadelphia, when she fears she will be smothered by the teachings and closeness of "the Bosoms" in her grandmother and mother's house. Sweet Summer is a book about growing up, about new clothes and mosquito bites, about being one of too few black students in an integrated school, about family rituals and ties, about loving your parents and not understanding divorce. Thoughtful, poignant, humorous, it is full of details that make scenes burst open in front of your eyes. Bebe Moore Campbell's book strengthens like a good meal - through the languorous rhythms of North Carolina and the stop-start street talk of Philadelphia that take you home even if you never lived there, and through her ability to accept and love those around her, especially her father, the big, black, determined man in a wheelchair who used to sing out "BebebebebebeMoore." -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister