Take a photo of a barcode or cover
quadrille 's review for:
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore
by Kim Fu
Kayla understood this as a fundamental difference between men and women: men could leave, women had to stay.
This is shelved as a YA book on Goodreads -- I suspect because of its short length at just 256 pages, and how the protagonists are pre-teens during one of the story threads; but I actually feel like this just vibes better as literary fiction? The prose is so lovely, soft and meditative and meandering, to the extent that it actually managed to crack open a reading lull that I was stuck in, and I happily inhaled this. 4.5 stars.
I went fairly blind into the book, and I think that served me well because I see from unfavourable reviews that a lot of people's grievances settle on 'it's not what I expected from the blurb'. So, I would say don't approach it like a mystery or a thriller or even Lord of the Flies: it's more of a character study, the traumatic event more a framework for the more domestic, slice-of-life tales later, which I found oddly riveting.
I really loved the back-and-forth structure, myself: one narrative thread in the past, centering on what happened to these girls on that fateful weekend at Camp Forevermore, when they were stranded in the wilderness and had to survive. The rest is alternating glimpses into their futures, the women they grew up to become, the lives that unfurled, the ripples and effects that that event had on them -- or didn't. It's more about the small things made horrifying, like a family dog, or motherhood, or the expectations piled on girls from a young age onwards.
In my Kindle Highlights, I'm actually going to mark most of my quotes as a spoiler, because I consider the characterisation details as the real 'spoiler': finding out who they became, what they did with their lives, how small childhood tics blossom into adult traits & damage. Kim Fu isn't afraid, either, of making her characters unlikeable or vicious. The women go through rough circumstances later in life, too, but it's never tragedy porn, it never milks their suffering. It's just... life, in all its touching quiet happiness and sadness.
I'm hard-pressed to choose a favourite character/thread. I think Andee's chapter got me most, with the sisterly relationship between her and Kayla (and it was an interesting choice to frame it from Kayla's POV instead, so that we only ever see Andee from the sidelines, from a remove -- which I see that some people disliked, but again, I loved as an experiment, I love exploring how a character might be seen from the outside). I also loved, loved Isabel and Dina's separate-but-intersecting stories, two different portraits of the Asian-American experience in the Pacific Northwest (which setting is also close to my heart, since I lived in Vancouver for half a decade). Mother-daughter relationships, in all their different permutations and varieties, also feature prominently.
Anyway, I suppose YMMV, but if you like well-written character studies and vignettes, I am all about this.
Read for my reading bingo square: Pick one of 46 books by WOC.