Almost everything about Kim Fu’s The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore looks like a young-adult novel—the overlong and fantastical-sounding title, the apparent focus on youths, the dreamy starlit cover with oars crossing in the center—but it’s not. It’s a gripping survival story about the lives of six diverse women—Nita, Andee, Kayla, Isabel, Dina, Siobhan—who first meet at an all-girls summer camp in the Pacific Northwest.
Fu, who reads from the book at Elliott Bay Book Company on February 13, opens her novel with some classic summer-camp tropes. The girls sing songs around the fire, feel embarrassed about their developing bodies, form friendships, and harass the weak. Though these social dynamics might sound familiar, Fu renders the particularities and weird ambiguities of preteen cruelty in ways that will transport you back the fluorescent horrors of your own middle-school cafeteria.
