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My Bicentennial Summer: True Adventures from the Most Epic Family Road Trip of All Time
Award-winning author G. Neri reflects on a childhood cross-country road trip with his family, sharing the wonder of America’s most famous landmarks, the best (and worst) of its history, and the remarkable diversity of its people.
The year is 1976, and America is throwing its biggest birthday party ever—its bicentennial. What better way to celebrate than with an eight-thousand-mile road trip? In this vibrant follow-up to his travelogue, My Antarctica: True Adventures in the Land of Mummified Seals, Space Robots, and So Much More, author G. Neri recalls his family’s real-life journey in a station wagon crossing twenty-six states in seven weeks, from California to Washington, DC, with only the aid of paper maps and transistor radios rather than smartphones and GPS. Young Greg is entranced by the variety of accents, strange foods, natural wonders, and historical attractions, from the Grand Canyon to the Statue of Liberty. He meets Civil War reenactors at Gettysburg, protesters in Philadelphia, pioneer wagon riders in Valley Forge, and his own rambunctious Texan cousins. And he glimpses the darker side of traveling as a family of color, pondering whether “We the People” includes people like him. Engaging text, sidebars, photos, and dynamic illustrations by Corban Wilkin create a personal snapshot of this extraordinary moment in US history, when a weary, post-Vietnam nation embraced the spirit of celebration. Back matter includes an author’s note, history and travel facts, and recommended reading.
The year is 1976, and America is throwing its biggest birthday party ever—its bicentennial. What better way to celebrate than with an eight-thousand-mile road trip? In this vibrant follow-up to his travelogue, My Antarctica: True Adventures in the Land of Mummified Seals, Space Robots, and So Much More, author G. Neri recalls his family’s real-life journey in a station wagon crossing twenty-six states in seven weeks, from California to Washington, DC, with only the aid of paper maps and transistor radios rather than smartphones and GPS. Young Greg is entranced by the variety of accents, strange foods, natural wonders, and historical attractions, from the Grand Canyon to the Statue of Liberty. He meets Civil War reenactors at Gettysburg, protesters in Philadelphia, pioneer wagon riders in Valley Forge, and his own rambunctious Texan cousins. And he glimpses the darker side of traveling as a family of color, pondering whether “We the People” includes people like him. Engaging text, sidebars, photos, and dynamic illustrations by Corban Wilkin create a personal snapshot of this extraordinary moment in US history, when a weary, post-Vietnam nation embraced the spirit of celebration. Back matter includes an author’s note, history and travel facts, and recommended reading.
96 pages, Hardcover
Published March 3, 2026
About the author
G. Neri
24 books342 followersG. Neri is the Coretta Scott King honor-winning author of Yummy: the Last Days of a Southside Shorty and the recipient of the Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award for his free-verse novella, Chess Rumble. His books have been translated into multiple languages in over 25 countries. They include the novels Tru & Nelle, A Christmas Tale, Ghetto Cowboy, Knockout Games, Surf Mules, and two free-verse picture book bios, When Paul Met Artie and Hello, I'm Johnny Cash. In 2017, he was awarded a National Science Foundation grant that sent him to Antarctica.
Prior to becoming a writer, Neri was a filmmaker, an animator/illustrator, a digital media producer, and a founding member of The Truth anti-smoking campaign. Neri currently writes full-time and lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. You can find him online at www.gneri.com.
Prior to becoming a writer, Neri was a filmmaker, an animator/illustrator, a digital media producer, and a founding member of The Truth anti-smoking campaign. Neri currently writes full-time and lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida with his wife and daughter. You can find him online at www.gneri.com.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 7, 2026
As someone who loves American history, national parks, and a good interstate road trip, this was a fun picture book to explore! The pictures were actual photographs (many taken by the author in 1976 with his Polaroid camera!) coupled with cartoon doodles that were just so fun to look at. Under the lists and travelogue was a real sense of devotion to our country while also wrestling with the ways we haven't lived up to our ideals. I got much of the same feeling when visiting Washington DC last spring.
April 1, 2026
Don't ask me why I got weepy reading this book, but I totally did. As an adult, this really took me back to family road trips as a child when we drove from Utah to North Carolina and everywhere in between. Like 'My Antarctica' (a book I truly loved) this book makes great use of a scrapbook format with photos, drawings, and notebook lined pages telling the story of a great American road trip. The back matter is interesting also, especially because I realized that I didn't know much about the Pledge of Allegiance or where it came from.
Publishing this book at the perfect time was a smart move, this book is making me want to drive America for America250.
Publishing this book at the perfect time was a smart move, this book is making me want to drive America for America250.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Poor publishers. Poor poor publishers. They’ve been put in an impossible position. 2026 marks the Semiquincentennial of the United States. Put another way, on July 4, 2026 we hit our 250th anniversary as a nation. Which wouldn’t be all that hard to celebrate, were it not for the fact that our president is…well… not making us feel great to be Americans right now, quite frankly. Sort of feels like we imported our own King George III and set him up on this side of the ocean. By all rights, publishers should be cranking out the rah-rah-U.S.A. books by the droves, and they are… kinda. But as a great man once said, no one ever made a statue of the person who said, “It’s a little more complicated than that.” That means that authors, illustrators, and publishers have had to get creative with their publications. For every rah-rah book you see, there’s a book like America’s Founding Myths by Christy Mihaly. For every mindless repetition of the pledge of allegiance you’ll get something as slick, sly, and smart as Seven Milion Steps by Derrick Barnes about Dick Gregory’s run for hunger during the bicentennial. And for every rote accounting of flags, eagles, and fireworks, you’ll get a book like G. Neri’s wholly inspired (and deeply amusing) My Bicentennial Summer. Neri takes the facts of what happened when his family embarked on the road trip to beat all road trips, and ties that summer during the bicentennial into the state of the country today. Deeply fun, utterly smart, visually arresting, and patriotic in the best possible way, this is how it’s done, people.
Imagine it’s America’s 200th birthday and your family announces that this summer you’re going on a road trip. Not just any road trip either. More like an 8,000-mile road trip that traverses twenty-six states in 52 days! A trip that will look at big cities like L.A. and Philadelphia and incredible sights like the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains, all the with end goal of arriving in Washington D.C. in time for the Fourth of July celebrations of the country’s Bicentennial! What follows is an eye-opening experience recounted in Greg Neri’s singular voice. Readers experience both the highs and the lows of our country’s complex history, never losing sight of what makes it actually great, but never forgetting how much further we have to go.
This isn’t G. Neri’s first walk in the nonfiction-photos-personal-account park, y’know. His previous title My Antarctica was an eye-opening deep dive into the logistics and reality of visiting one of the coldest places on earth. What made that book so good, aside from the incredible firsthand reporting of hitherto unknown facts, was that it was a pure joy to read. Whatever designer and/or art director Candlewick assigns to these projects, they’re not being paid enough. Full-color pages overflow with images, illustrations, Polaroids, speech balloons, primary documents, you name it. For all that it’s a cacophony of visual delights, the book is never difficult to read. There’s an art to casting a reader’s eye around a page in the order you prefer, and this book has mastered it. Best of all, it manages to overcome one of the greatest challenges of the road trip middle grade: boredom. When characters in a book are bored, you are bored. Here, the boredom is acknowledged but there will be no lingering on it. Too much to experience! So much to see!
To be perfectly honest, the book that this reminded me of as I read, is none other than the Newbery Honor winning graphic novel Mexikid by Pedro Martin. In both cases a kid is forced into close proximity with his nearest and dearest on a summer road trip of incredible length. In both cases there are hijinks, sights, sounds, smells, and new things to encounter. If the hero’s journey is to begin with the “Call To Adventure”, then a forced road trip is a real-life experience many children are subjected to, to either their overall betterment or overall boredom (or both). For those kids who would wonder why they should read a book about a long car trip that’s not even their own, Greg peppers this book with history, facts, and interior monologues. It adroitly walks the line between “fun summer adventure” and “learn stuff, dammit!”.
Corban Wilkin was the man who previously worked with Neri on the previously mentioned My Antarctica. In that book he was able to supplement Greg’s massive number of photographs with the occasional drawing. Here, necessity has made him a much more prominent player. Greg has family photographs from this trip back in the day, sure (though I have my doubts about that one with the lightning), but logically he doesn’t have anything near to the number of images he was able to create for the Antarctica book. Wilkin to the rescue! The influence of comics on this book is the key. Panels, speech balloons, everything combines to bring Greg’s memories to life. Maybe that’s why I mentioned before that this book reminded me of Mexikid, though the text to image ration is probably more akin to a Diary of a Wimpy Kid title in the end.
To explain why his family chose to go on their trip, Greg prefaces his book with an explanation of what the bicentennial was and why it was so important. He gives a rundown on America’s fight for independence and there’s even a shot of President Reagan saying the Pledge of Allegiance (which is more than a touch odd since Reagan wasn’t even president in 1976). One might be a bit worried after seeing that photo that this is a book uninterested in taking much of a deeper dive into the complexity surrounding the state of affairs in America. Indeed, everything seems to continue fairly normally, but I was happy to see mention made of America’s darker past when the family goes through the South. Greg and his family have dark skin and he mentions some of the fear and racism they saw while in the area. Still, it’s pretty standard stuff, with time taken in the rotunda of the National Archives to look at portraits of the Founding Fathers and think about all the different kinds of people looking at them. A distinct shift comes when the family decides to see the 4th of July Parade in D.C. By accident, they instead stumble across a protest parade happening in a different part of town. “The signs said things like JOBS NOT WAR, POVERTY ISN’T WORTH CELEBRATING, and FREEDOM FOR ALL THE OPPRESSED… It turns out these people had been having a lot of the same feelings I had about the differences between the words in the Declaration of Independence and the real world we lived in. But they were using their voices to stand up for what they believed in… Isn’t that the American way?” It’s a brave, bold inclusion in the book, and it takes the dichotomy of what American says and what it does from just being in Greg’s head to the streets. The story goes on from there, back to the road trip, but it stuck with me. Then later, at the end of the book, Greg takes care to include a section on “Big Questions About American History” in the back, which are unafraid to ask things like “How did the Founders treat the Native Americans?” and to mention facts like the Supreme Court ruling in 1943 that students cannot be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance (I guarantee someone will find that interesting).
Writing about America right now is not a job of the weak. And Greg Neri? He’s no weakling. He’s an author willing to confront ugly truths and to teach them to our kids in a package that is both fun and challenging. Ultimately My Bicentennial Summer truly is a celebration of our country. It’s just the kind of thing that we actually need more than ever to get into the hands of our kids right now. The kind of understanding that might get us through our own Semiquincentennial and into the future we need.
Imagine it’s America’s 200th birthday and your family announces that this summer you’re going on a road trip. Not just any road trip either. More like an 8,000-mile road trip that traverses twenty-six states in 52 days! A trip that will look at big cities like L.A. and Philadelphia and incredible sights like the Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains, all the with end goal of arriving in Washington D.C. in time for the Fourth of July celebrations of the country’s Bicentennial! What follows is an eye-opening experience recounted in Greg Neri’s singular voice. Readers experience both the highs and the lows of our country’s complex history, never losing sight of what makes it actually great, but never forgetting how much further we have to go.
This isn’t G. Neri’s first walk in the nonfiction-photos-personal-account park, y’know. His previous title My Antarctica was an eye-opening deep dive into the logistics and reality of visiting one of the coldest places on earth. What made that book so good, aside from the incredible firsthand reporting of hitherto unknown facts, was that it was a pure joy to read. Whatever designer and/or art director Candlewick assigns to these projects, they’re not being paid enough. Full-color pages overflow with images, illustrations, Polaroids, speech balloons, primary documents, you name it. For all that it’s a cacophony of visual delights, the book is never difficult to read. There’s an art to casting a reader’s eye around a page in the order you prefer, and this book has mastered it. Best of all, it manages to overcome one of the greatest challenges of the road trip middle grade: boredom. When characters in a book are bored, you are bored. Here, the boredom is acknowledged but there will be no lingering on it. Too much to experience! So much to see!
To be perfectly honest, the book that this reminded me of as I read, is none other than the Newbery Honor winning graphic novel Mexikid by Pedro Martin. In both cases a kid is forced into close proximity with his nearest and dearest on a summer road trip of incredible length. In both cases there are hijinks, sights, sounds, smells, and new things to encounter. If the hero’s journey is to begin with the “Call To Adventure”, then a forced road trip is a real-life experience many children are subjected to, to either their overall betterment or overall boredom (or both). For those kids who would wonder why they should read a book about a long car trip that’s not even their own, Greg peppers this book with history, facts, and interior monologues. It adroitly walks the line between “fun summer adventure” and “learn stuff, dammit!”.
Corban Wilkin was the man who previously worked with Neri on the previously mentioned My Antarctica. In that book he was able to supplement Greg’s massive number of photographs with the occasional drawing. Here, necessity has made him a much more prominent player. Greg has family photographs from this trip back in the day, sure (though I have my doubts about that one with the lightning), but logically he doesn’t have anything near to the number of images he was able to create for the Antarctica book. Wilkin to the rescue! The influence of comics on this book is the key. Panels, speech balloons, everything combines to bring Greg’s memories to life. Maybe that’s why I mentioned before that this book reminded me of Mexikid, though the text to image ration is probably more akin to a Diary of a Wimpy Kid title in the end.
To explain why his family chose to go on their trip, Greg prefaces his book with an explanation of what the bicentennial was and why it was so important. He gives a rundown on America’s fight for independence and there’s even a shot of President Reagan saying the Pledge of Allegiance (which is more than a touch odd since Reagan wasn’t even president in 1976). One might be a bit worried after seeing that photo that this is a book uninterested in taking much of a deeper dive into the complexity surrounding the state of affairs in America. Indeed, everything seems to continue fairly normally, but I was happy to see mention made of America’s darker past when the family goes through the South. Greg and his family have dark skin and he mentions some of the fear and racism they saw while in the area. Still, it’s pretty standard stuff, with time taken in the rotunda of the National Archives to look at portraits of the Founding Fathers and think about all the different kinds of people looking at them. A distinct shift comes when the family decides to see the 4th of July Parade in D.C. By accident, they instead stumble across a protest parade happening in a different part of town. “The signs said things like JOBS NOT WAR, POVERTY ISN’T WORTH CELEBRATING, and FREEDOM FOR ALL THE OPPRESSED… It turns out these people had been having a lot of the same feelings I had about the differences between the words in the Declaration of Independence and the real world we lived in. But they were using their voices to stand up for what they believed in… Isn’t that the American way?” It’s a brave, bold inclusion in the book, and it takes the dichotomy of what American says and what it does from just being in Greg’s head to the streets. The story goes on from there, back to the road trip, but it stuck with me. Then later, at the end of the book, Greg takes care to include a section on “Big Questions About American History” in the back, which are unafraid to ask things like “How did the Founders treat the Native Americans?” and to mention facts like the Supreme Court ruling in 1943 that students cannot be forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance (I guarantee someone will find that interesting).
Writing about America right now is not a job of the weak. And Greg Neri? He’s no weakling. He’s an author willing to confront ugly truths and to teach them to our kids in a package that is both fun and challenging. Ultimately My Bicentennial Summer truly is a celebration of our country. It’s just the kind of thing that we actually need more than ever to get into the hands of our kids right now. The kind of understanding that might get us through our own Semiquincentennial and into the future we need.
March 9, 2026
[The author] recalls his family's real-life journey in a station wagon crossing twenty-six states in seven weeks, from California to Washington, DC, with only the aid of paper maps and transistor radios rather than smartphones and GPS. Young Greg is entranced by the variety of accents, strange foods, natural wonders, and historical attractions, from the Grand Canyon to the Statue of Liberty. He meets Civil War reenactors at Gettysburg, protesters in Philadelphia, pioneer wagon riders in Valley Forge, and his own rambunctious Texan cousins. And he glimpses the darker side of traveling as a family of color, pondering whether We the People includes people like him. Back matter includes an author's note, history and travel facts, and recommended reading.
Review of advance copy
Received at NCTE 2025.
This was a lot of fun. A great graphic memoir with cool mixed media illustrations.
This was a lot of fun. A great graphic memoir with cool mixed media illustrations.
April 6, 2026
If you're a kid who was around during the Bicentennial, you are going to love this book more than a kid who wasn't! A wonderful time capsule of 1976...but also the value of a family road trip!
April 18, 2026
EARC provided by Edelweiss Plus
This is a great choice for summer reading lists. It’s funny and it’s informative.
This is a great choice for summer reading lists. It’s funny and it’s informative.
January 30, 2026
Super cool memoir of a trip across the country with his family in 1976. I love that this picture-book-sized story feels like reading his scrapbook… Tons of personality and so many snippets of fun and information!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews