P.S. Be Eleven

By: Rita Williams-Garcia / Narrated By: Sisi Aisha Johnson

Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins

Two audiobooks in the series down, and only ONE to go?!? Oh nooooooo!!! C’mon, Rita: Write a few more for this series!!!

Ours is not a very formal little audiobook club. If it were, we’d have done One Crazy Summer as a palate cleanser since we’d been letting Life get us down (Think: Global Pandemic, Political Upheavals, Attempted Coups), and we’d have gone on to something else, a different genre, something challenging.

Uhm, nope. We RAN to the second in the series, and I gotta tell ya: We LOVED P.S. Be Eleven. Besides which, this has some fairly challenging stuff in it, and Williams-Garcia doesn't shy away from anything.

Delphine and little sisters Vonetta (The showboat) and Fern (aka Afua, the budding poet) have just flown back from spending the summer with their estranged mother Cecile… and the Black Panthers. They’re newly proud Black girls, but their grandmother meeting them at their airport is firmly colored, or a Negro. You see, she’s from the South, and she worries a LOT about what white people could do to her much-loved granddaughters should they be seen to be getting out of line. Things go from bad (Making too many sounds of joy) to worse when Delphine, running to Big Ma jostles a white man and his newspaper goes scattering around.

SLAP!

And things just go downhill from there.

Then too, their dad, who’s forever had a sad and long face, is now kinda sorta humming and smiling. And is he dressing differently? Whazzaaaa?!? And Uncle Darnell whom they’ve been worried about forEVER since he’s been fighting in Vietnam is coming back home. But he’s quiet, zones out, sleeps a lot, doesn’t remember anything good in their lives. Plus he’s just different, in a bad sorta way. Whazzaaaa?!?

And who is this new exchange teacher from Zambia who’s there instead of the coolest teacher Delphine had been looking forward to now that she’s in the 6th grade? Is he enlightening her, inspiring her to read Chinua Achebe (Which mother Cecile applauds but suggests shouldn’t be read until stubborn Delphine is old enough to appreciate it and really take it to heart)? And how can Delphine be penpals with Hirohito if she doesn’t know his address over in Oakland? How can he take her to the 6th Grade Big Dance?

There’s soooo much in this little, itty bit of a book (I mean itty cuz it’s not the 10 hours I wish it was!). Friendships that run hot, cold, warm. A stodgy dad in love with a bold woman. A Big Ma who rules with an iron fist and a fearful heart. An uncle who saw waaaay too much and probably did more than he wanted to in Vietnam. Women running in the man’s world of politics. And even boys not being soooooo icky, talking to the girls like regular people rather than tormenting and teasing them.

And through it all is the fierce sisterhood that gets the three through the day, through their lives. Where Delphine is counseled to be as young as her age, for now, while she has this chance, to lay down the heavy burdens that have been placed on her (And, Delphine wonders, how is it fair that she gets the slap if her sisters misbehave?!). This exasperating sisterhood where you wanna slap each other one second but are looking for the kindest belt for a whoopin’ the next: You wanna throttle, but you’d take the bullet any day of the week too.

Sisi Aisha Johnson? PERFECTION as always. This is a bit of a roller coaster as far as situations and emotions go, but Johnson does the MULtitude of characters, their back-and-forth whipsaw smackdowns, their private thoughts and earnest musings with utter and unswerving faithfulness to the text. As a matter of fact, she did Big Ma’s angsty drawl so well that my own mom had trouble understanding it. I didn’t have the same problem, tho’ so I think most will be okay with it. LOVE Ms. Johnson!

Nope, not a staid and formal audiobook club… cuz what did we all do? Did we listen to P.S. Be Eleven, enjoy it, go onto a different genre, something of a more serious nature?

Heck noooooo! We are SOOOO onto the next in the series!

And please oh please oh pretty please, Ms. Garcia-Williams? May it NOT be the last…!