Sweet Summer: Growing Up With & Without My Dad » (Reissue)

Bebe Moore grew up in a divided world—between her mother's house in Philadelphia and the "sweet summers" spent South with a disabled father. Sweet Summer is her acclaimed account of those years, a story of finding her father in a fractured family. "A wonderful book!"--Bill Cosby.

Publishers Weekly

This insightful tribute to fathers—biological and stand-in—and mothers is told in a series of reminiscences of black writer Campbell's (Successful Women, Angry Men) childhood, which she spent with each of her divorced parents in turn: her mother in Philadelphia and her father, a paraplegic, in rural North Carolina. Campbell's narrative skillfully weaves childhood and adult voices together, showing a healthy respect for the cadences of black English. Her focus is on her changing view of her father as she grows from childhood to adolescence; once a loving but absentee god-like figure, he comes to seem a mortal and flawed human with whom she achieves a loving and mature relationship ("the best part of my father, the jewel stuck deep inside his core, was determination"'). She writes of the transition with the poignant longing of a child and the knowledge of an adult. The book also concerns coming of age black in the civil rights era: summers spent in a South where signs for "colored'' were common and winters in Philadelphia, where Campbell's mother "was absolutely savage about enunciation, pronunciation, speaking correctly, so that they would approve.'' (June)