Reviews with content warning for Gore - Camp Zero

It’s very-near speculative fiction. The slightly elevated technology that encourages total detachment from the world. Violent impacts of climate change and ecological disaster. A continuation of those with a sense of power ripping away land and shaping it in their image.

And interwoven through all that - classism, possible collective utopia after criss, survival, curious gender binaries.

We follow three different POVs in the far north of Canada. Rose is an escort who has a secret reason for her placement at Camp Zero: she’s spying on its head architect in exchange for a secured future for herself & her mother. Grant is running away from his powerful family and the mistakes of his past, hoping to solidify his life in the north as an English professor. And the female collective of White Alice learns to survive and thrive in a climate research station.

We flip-flop through past and present during each POV, and layers of the mysteries surrounding Camp Zero and White Alice are slowly unfurled.

In my opinion, calling this a dystopian thriller is a mischaracterization. It is a slow, character-driven piece. Each POV is lost in swirling memories, and the action of the present is much shorter. The world of Camp Zero is very much our own.

The weakest point to me was a lack of intersectionality. While classism and sexism come into play quite a bit, race is curiously missing from the picture. Indigenous voices were referenced but not really explored; Rose is half-Korean but it was never significant outside of some discussions of her family’s immigration. I think there was an opportunity to dive deeper into gender & expanding boundaries and perceived binaries during the White Alice chapters, and that was missed a bit.

I thought the writing was incredibly strong, and there are elements here that will sit with me for a bit. I think it would be a great book club pick as well - and a group of readers would probably have vastly different takeaways and opinions on the final segment.

CW: murder, death, misogyny, sexual assault, animal cruelty & animal death, gore, toxic relationship, grief, classism, colonization, racism, pregnancy, sexual content

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(I received an advance reader copy of this book; this is my honest review.)

Content Warnings

caseythereader's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Thanks to Atria Books for the free advance copy of this book.

- CAMP ZERO is a near future dystopia, terrifying in that it's not all that different from the path we are currently on.
- I flew through this novel, fully immersed in its world and invested in the characters, all of whom have come north for different reasons, all of whom have done good things and bad things and are simply trying to survive.
- CAMP ZERO mainly explores how gender effects each character's path in this melting world, but it also gets into class, race, education and more. I already want to read more by Sterling.

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