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A review by catsunshine
Night Owls and Summer Skies by Rebecca Sullivan
2.0
This book is about a girl, Emma, who goes to a summer camp for teens aged 15 to 18. There, she meets her first friend, Gwen, who is the youngest daughter of the director of the camp and falls in love with Vivian, the older daughter, who is a councillor at camp. The premise sounds amazing, as I'm usually a huge fan of the whole summer camps idea. Unfortunately, the whole book is just so unrealistic and, honestly, not very well written.
So let's start with my problems with the plot. The idea of a camp for older teens is really interesting for me, as normally camps say they are for all ages but then activities are quite boring for older teens. However, Camp Mapplewood was strictly for kids aged 15 and above and yet all the activities sounded like a 12 year old ideal of fun. If that was all, I'd have been able to overcome my problems and simply accept that american teens are simply different and actually enjoy that kind of thing. Notwithstanding, there were so many plotholes or simply things that made no sense at all. I don't want to go into any specifics so I don't give any spoilers but for example (SPOILER ALERT) how come Mr Black was so into following the rules of camp and there was a rule saying basically councillors couldn't date campers but when it's a lesbian couple they're all suddenly accepting relationships?? (END OF SPOILER). There were just too many things that didn't make sense, the world just seemed to change in order to accommodate their relationship and frankly I didn't like it.
About the writing, maybe this was a problem of my kindle or the format, but it was really hard to follow dialogues, as I wouldn't understand who was saying what. I think having a paragraph before each of the characters speaking would make it a lot more comprehensible, but again, maybe it was just a matter of formatting.
Overall, I think this book had the potential to be really amusing and heart-warming, but for me, it was a 2/5 book.
So let's start with my problems with the plot. The idea of a camp for older teens is really interesting for me, as normally camps say they are for all ages but then activities are quite boring for older teens. However, Camp Mapplewood was strictly for kids aged 15 and above and yet all the activities sounded like a 12 year old ideal of fun. If that was all, I'd have been able to overcome my problems and simply accept that american teens are simply different and actually enjoy that kind of thing. Notwithstanding, there were so many plotholes or simply things that made no sense at all. I don't want to go into any specifics so I don't give any spoilers but for example (SPOILER ALERT) how come Mr Black was so into following the rules of camp and there was a rule saying basically councillors couldn't date campers but when it's a lesbian couple they're all suddenly accepting relationships?? (END OF SPOILER). There were just too many things that didn't make sense, the world just seemed to change in order to accommodate their relationship and frankly I didn't like it.
About the writing, maybe this was a problem of my kindle or the format, but it was really hard to follow dialogues, as I wouldn't understand who was saying what. I think having a paragraph before each of the characters speaking would make it a lot more comprehensible, but again, maybe it was just a matter of formatting.
Overall, I think this book had the potential to be really amusing and heart-warming, but for me, it was a 2/5 book.