Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the ARC of this book in exchange for a honest review.

For those of us who did not spend every summer at a sleep away camp this book definitely made me feel like I missed out on something. This book examines the different friendships and relationships between campers and counselors at a sleep away camp in the Berkshires. It's one of those books that reminds you that you truly never know or understand what's going on in someone's life even if that someone is a lifelong friend. The book has some pretty heavy themes in it but Berman balances them out with lighthearted camp moments which keeps the book from feeling too heavy and depressing. Her writing style makes this book a good read for an older YA crowd but also adults in general. In fact this could be one of those books a parent/child could read together that could lead to an open and honest conversation about the world.

I highly recommend this book. I think it's going to be one of the top YA books of the summer.

Was left breathless after finishing Mandy Berman’s debut Perennials. Set at a summer camp, spanning 2000 - 2006, it is everything you may want from a coming of age story told by many different points of view. It is such a great insight into female friendships, and how they can morph throughout the process of maturing, distance, and experience. I loved how the focus shifts from character to character, and always being surprised who we hear from next, spanning 11 year olds to parents and other adults. It is a great, bittersweet binge read.

Wow! This is not just a fun nostalgic read of your camp days. This is a powerful book, similar to "Beartown," about the secrets we hide as a community, a society, etc. just so we fit in. The right social circles, the right schools, neighborhoods, cliques, and maybe even summer camps. It starts in childhood doesn't it? Who your friends are, where you go to school, if and where you go to camp, if your parents are divorced, a child of a single parent. It goes on and on. Even at a kid's camp, who could take advantage of who, the privileged and those who are not.
Parents should read this, everyone should read this. Recommend.

It was a great read. I feel the character development was good and I would recommend to friends.

When Rachel Rivkin and Fiona Larkin meet at Camp Marigold, they embark on a friendship that spans years, despite very different families and lifestyles. Rachel, daughter of a single mom and a married man, is street smart, popular, and searching for anyone or anything to ease her loneliness. Fiona, middle child of a typical Westchester family, longs to fit in, be thin, be relevant. As the two return to camp as counselors, their stories - along with those of fellow counselors, campers, and others - weave into a story of coming of age, of loneliness, of secrets that corrupt and bind, of discovering who you are...

Perennials is a sophisticated YA look into the identities we craft to protect ourselves, as well as a glimpse into how even the ugliest of truths can sometimes set us free.

I attended a sleep-away summer camp in the Catskills Mountains for 10 years, from the summer I was 10 until the summer I was 19. It's crazy to think that I started there nearly 40(!) years ago, and made some incredible friendships which have sustained through all this time, thanks in some part to social media.

Over the years I realized that only those people who had similar experiences truly "got" what camp meant—how spending every day for eight weeks with people created more intense relationships than with those people you saw 10 months a year back home; how you'd spend so much time during the fall and winter wishing you could be back in camp, thinking of all of the things you couldn't wait to do when summer rolled around again, and how it felt like you could just pick right back up where you left off the year before. Many of those years were some of the best times of my life, and it's crazy how vivid the memories of those days still are given there are days I can't remember where I put my wallet.

Needless to say, when I saw that Mandy Berman's debut novel, Perennials, touched on the camp experience, I jumped on it. Rachel Rivkin and Fiona Larkin met as campers at Camp Marigold, the same camp where Fiona's parents met as children and fell in love.

Even though Rachel and Fiona don't see each other much during the winter months, their friendship is as solid as ever, and they've already planned to stay in the same tent and be as inseparable as always. Yet the summer they turn 13 is a pivotal one, as they teeter on the brink between adolescence and self-proclaimed maturity, innocence and bravado, and their differences threaten to harm their friendship.

Rachel, the daughter of a single mother, knows she is fortunate to go to camp every summer, since they lack the financial resources Fiona's family has. Yet Rachel has something Fiona lacks—self-confidence in her looks and a willingness to test the limits of her budding sexuality, while Fiona has no interest in doing the same and resents Rachel both for moving forward without her and keeping secrets when she does. Even so, they know that their friendship is more important than anything else.

Six years later, Rachel and Fiona return to Camp Marigold as counselors. While they've maintained their friendship even though they attend separate colleges, they're looking forward to one last summer together before they need to become "adults" and pursue internships, jobs, etc. Yet it's not long after that they fall into the same behavior patterns—Rachel is rebellious, flirtatious, confident, and willing to take risks, while Fiona, caught in a cycle of low self-esteem, begins feeling the distance between her and Rachel growing.

During that last summer, things change for both of them, things that rock their lives and Camp Marigold. The book follows not only Rachel and Fiona, but Fiona's younger sister, Helen, now a camper, as well as some of the other counselors and camp staff. This is a book about the power and the burden of friendship, how sometimes our differences make us stronger friends while at other times they just ultimately tear us apart. It's also a book about how fast we want to become adults until we find ourselves in adult situations, and then we wish we could have our innocence back again.

I thought this was an interesting book, and there were definitely instances which I could so vividly picture in my head, as they reminded me of my own experience at camp. Berman is a very talented writer and she knows how to make you care about her characters, even when they may annoy you more than a little bit. (But chances are you know people just like them.)

I liked the first section of the book, which followed Rachel and Fiona as campers, but once the story moved six years later, I feel as if Berman got a little too ambitious and lost the focus and heart of her story. The book suddenly shifted to characters we had never met before, characters who seemed reasonably peripheral to the actual plot, and yet there was a great deal of time dedicated to them. They were interesting but it distracted from the real story (or at least what I wanted the real story to be). I also felt as if Rachel went a little too far, even though I could understand her motivations, and that made her a little less interesting.

I'll admit I was hoping this would provoke a little more nostalgia and generate a little less drama, but perhaps that was my fault. Still, this is a solid story about adolescent friendships and how they sometimes struggle as they move into adulthood, and I'd imagine that given the main characters are both female, it may resonate a bit more for women than it did me.

NetGalley and Random House provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

This is a must have summer read for viewers of all ages! I read this book in one day because I was so engrossed in the story line and the characters - I absolutely could not put it down-. The authors is able to successfully stir a lot of emotions in her readers with this book, and the fact that it is a debut novel is captivating! The author writes like a seasoned pro! I can see many of her novels (including this one) being books that readers come back to all the time! 100%... this book is MUST read.

Note: My full review of this novel will be published on my website and book retailers (amazon, goodreads, b&n etc. closer to release date). Thank you!

Although this was a light, quick read, I only made it to 25% before bailing. With the exception of a single adult scene, this is better categorized as YA. The story was like eavesdropping on the conversations of teenage girls without any plot to this point. Also, there was an abrupt POV change which was confusing. Not my cuppa. No rating since I didn't complete the book.

I enjoyed the overall theme of this book and the portrayals at the end but otherwise, this was another readable YA book.

The blurb does not lie in that Berman really captures the beauty of summer camp, both for younger kids and for the older counselors, young adults coming into their own. The inclusion of foreign counselors made the book all the more interesting for me.

I enjoyed the way this dealt with race and issues of socioeconomic status within the younger campers. Seeing how this played out, seeing how the scholarship kids made it and didn’t, was important and added a layer of depth. I was definitely rooting for those kids.

A perennial is unchanging and never truly ends. I adored the way that this theme recurred through the book and how it ultimately came to fruition and truth at the end. This dealt with growing up very well and really provoked thought about youth and how it fades.

If you adore the summer camp vibe or need a solid YA, this is a good contender. Ultimately though, the theme was the only point that made this book stand out.

While I found the book to be somewhat disjointed, the overall story was good. The disjointed aspect had to do with the fact that there were a number of storylines and just as I became intrigued with one, it seemed a new set of characters would be introduced. In the end, though, I enjoyed the book. The story was compelling and the ending unexpected, but not in a disappointing way.

While this novel is seemingly centered on Rachel and Fiona with other narrators thrown in to give the book more layers, the ending comes hard and fast in a way that ties all the stories together. I was shocked and also felt that it was done so skillfully that I didn't see the threads coming together, which was in itself a novelty. A great read.

For readers like myself who relish the memories from summer camp on a weekly basis, this book is everything you want it to be. Berman wisely chose Camp Marigold as the name for the camp where Rachel, Fiona, Helen, and the Larkin parents bloomed; after all, marigolds are "annual flowers: They grew only throughout the course of one summer, and the following year, they had to be replanted in order to bloom again. The counselor welcomed all the newcomers: all the little seed girls who would soon grow into beautiful marigolds." (WILL PUT PAGE NUMBER IN HERE LATER). But what happens when Fiona and Rachel, two life-long marigolds, return as counselors? They begin to see themselves and their relationships with each other, the camp staff, and their campers, in ways they don't expect. Berman does an excellent job of creating a sisterhood dynamic amongst the campers, actual siblings, and friends who act more like sisters. Her sense of place will make you want to find a new "Camp Marigold" setting in your life, or return to the one of your youth. While there are tragic moments and heartbreak in Perennials, the way it's approached couldn't have been done more seamlessly. Don't miss this one!

I'm not sure what to think about this book. Everything in the last quarter in the book was just really dark and felt disjointed. I could never really figure out where the plot was going, which isn't always a good thing. I wouldn't say it had a satisfying ending, either. Rachel and Fiona are friends from summer camp and return to be counselors after they go off to college. In a way, this book seems to be more about their families and how screwed up their relationships are. It very heavily features Fiona's sister Helen. I think it's less of a story about friendship and more of a story about how people don't really know each other at all- or at least I get the feeling these people didn't really know each other. It was slow in the middle and I was starting to get confused about where the story was going. If you're looking for a story with a light, happy ending, this is not it.

A half decent debut novel. Annual summer camp for friends and new acquaintances all blend together to give the reader a look into the personal dynamics that form during a summer together - with an ending you don't expect.