The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore by Kim Fu

Every year at Camp Forevermore the campers go on a kayaking trip where they spend one night off site, roughing it in the wild. All the things they’ve learned at the camp, they get to do on this trip with the assistance of one camp counselor. When Siobahn, Nita, Dina, Isabel, and Andee left with their counselor Jan, one fine day in the summer, they had no idea they would soon be alone fending for themselves in the wilderness. No idea the limits they would have to push themselves to survive. They had no idea how fear would push the very limits of their sanity.

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore was an interesting book but not one that I loved. The narrative shifts from the events that happened at Camp Forevermore, to the lives of each of the girls in the years following. I enjoyed the narrative of the past. I found the overall tones of those chapters, with the fear, desperation and uncertainty to be really well done. The chapters revolving around each girl individually weren’t as strong or as well planned out to me. Honestly, I just felt disconnected from those chapters for the most part. We didn’t know the girls well enough before the trip to determine how such a traumatizing event really affected them. There was also no connection to each other after the events. It felt like a lot went unsaid regarding the events after the kayaking trip.

I thought this novel was just okay. The beautiful world building and detail that went into the Camp Forevermore chapters, didn’t translate into the narratives of each girl. It felt like Fu was stretching the narrative to make the events connect back to their past experiences together and I don’t feel like that was very successful. I honestly could have read an entire book about Camp Forevermore because the way Fu initially crafted the story and the relationships between girls was very well done. I’m anxious to see what Fu does next. I would read more from her even though this wasn’t a favorite. I’m intrigued enough by her writing style to try more from her.

Kim Fu’s novel The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, digital galley) alternates between the stories of five young women who experienced a traumatic event at camp while girls. Unfortunately it reads as a disparate collection of unrelated stories, with the camp experience being the only thing connecting the women.

While each of the women’s future lives is interesting, it’s not clear what impact that camp event has had on the women, the drama is simply too subdued. Any one of the life stories would have been more compelling if flushed out as a full novel. But by combining the stories, all continuity is lost and just as we’re getting to know each of the characters their story is cut short for a flashback to camp.

Fu is clearly a talented writer and has a lot to say about relationships and how individuals deal with loss. The potential of this novel, however, feels unfulfilled.

In The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, five girls set out with their camp leader on a kayaking and camping excursion. Their leader decides to push the girls even harder, rowing for a farther, more secluded island for camping. No one from camp knows where they went, and no one from camp knows that these girls are stranded and alone. There is a pivotal point in these characters’ lives that changes the course of their adulthoods.

The novel is told in vignettes, back and forth in time from the adolescent girls at Camp Forevermore and then their later adult lives. Each girl’s story is told in turn. Not all the girls’ adult stories seem relevant to the camp incident, but perhaps that’s the point the author is subtly implying: some girls overcome, and some never recover. I appreciated that the characters were not cardboard stereotypes. The girls have different personalities and come from different backgrounds, and that adds to their experience and also to their suffering on the island.

I enjoyed this novel. The writing is intelligent and contemplative. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is a story of basest natures coming to the surface when faced with adversity with the follow up of how one trauma can infect people’s minds for the rest of their lives. I look forward to reading more from this author.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

I had trouble getting into this book. It seems like an interesting story and would be very empowering.

An interesting and sensitive portrayal of how events--even ones that are not so large or tragic--can shape entire lives.

I received this ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

How much can one particular moment in your life affect the rest of your life? That seems to be the question this book is asking.

5 girls out on a kayak trip during summer camp have their "formulative moment" when their trip leader dies. The plans were changed mid trip so they're camping on a different island, and their kayaks with most their supplies have floated away. A traumatic and trying moment for anyone, we're lead to believe that this helps define these girls as they grow older. It's quite obvious that this affected some of the girls more than others and perhaps some more negatively than others.

The story is told with the kayak trip broken up into separate chapters. Between each chapter is a chapter following one of the girls on the trip as she grows older. It's interesting to see how certain choices they made on that trip impacted the rest of their lives - at least for some of the characters. For one of the characters, her storyline is told from the point of view of her sister. It actually manages to give more backstory for that character than much insight about that characters future. For another character, it seemed like she didn't even have to have that experience to become the person she became.

While it perhaps would be more interesting to have all the stories tie back to the "main story", it's more realistic that different people get impacted in different ways.

My main problem is that it felt like the characters, while being wildly different people with different personalities, seemed to have a very similar thought process. It's one of those tells of a characters written by the same author and tweaked to have specific different personalities but kind of coming off the same. The chapters for each individual girl never really gave the girls enough time to grow and become a real person.

It's an interesting concept and a decent enough story.

DNF

I could not read past page 34. I want to know what happened at the camp, but not if it means putting myself through a chapter for each character that follows their entire life, and was just not written well.

What a dark, weird, fascinating little book! Five girls go through a traumatic experience at a summer camp that follows them in different ways for the rest of their lives. It's part mystery (omg, tell me what happened already!!!) and part short story collection, as each chapter follows a different girl as she grows up. I think it takes real talent to write characters that are deeply flawed and "unlikable", but still make the reader root for them. There's so much loaded into these short pages about grief and trauma, about how something can be so intricately tied to your life even if you feel you've moved past it, about how a shared experience can affect those involved very differently. I couldn't put it down.

Unfortunately, I didn't finish this book. I just couldn't find the characters interesting enough to do so. I was more interested in what happened at Camp Forevermore and that was the story I was hoping would have been more developed. Honestly, the author could've ended the book with that and it would've been just fine. Great writing, but just didn't care for the organization of the novel.

I had to pause for several hours between finishing reading The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, and writing a review of it, as I needed time for my thoughts about it to gel.

You've read the book blurb, I read the book blurb, so I'm not going to repeat it here. That being said, the book is not at all what I expected. It would seem that the main event and storyline through the book would be the gone-wrong wilderness trip. But it isn't. In fact, except for the short beginning, and minimal mentions throughout the book, it doesn't get a lot of play time at all.

Instead, Fu focuses on in-depth portrayals of each of the girls that were part of that group; from before they went to camp in some cases through to adulthood. Her characterizations are rich and full, but I felt I wasn't given enough reason to care about the girls before the book spun off into separate chapters for each of them.

I enjoy the way Kim Fu writes. And I will be looking forward to her next book. But this one just didn't work for me. I give it 3 stars for the future promise of Fu, but this effort fell short.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Houghton-Mifflin for providing me an e-ARC of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are strictly my own.

I was wildly excited before I began reading this story. I envision a narrative similar to Lord of the Flies but with females (and maybe less death). Unfortunately, this story didn't meet all of my expectations and thus left me feeling disappointed.

Though I did enjoy the book, which was well written and the character development was fantastic; I needed more narrative of the camping trip. I JUST WANTED MORE.

The structure of the story is split into two different parts, alternating between the time during the camping incident and what happened to each of the young girls in the future. I really loved that all 5 of the young females are from very different backgrounds. There was an amazing amount of diversity which was made refreshing to read, as well as interesting. You see this in each of their own future chapters. Some character's stories I really enjoyed reading, my heart went out to them. In different ways, their lives had not turned out exactly how they wanted it to be.

What I, unfortunately, did not like were these chapters were long. In no way did I find them boring, however, I kept finding myself wanting to get back to the action. What happened to the girls on the island?

I understand why these particular chapters were written. To show how the characters had been affected by the event, though I don't think it was really achieved. I was majorly annoyed that one of the girls barely got a chapter of her own. Towards the end, I was so invested in their stories that I was screaming when this particular character got the bare minimum at the end.

Obviously, I felt the ending was rushed.
I wanted the narrative to grip me into a disastrous and deadly setting, but I it didn't happen. I felt as if I was drifting in and out of the narrative.

I didn't hate it, but the story lacked the excitement I was expecting. It was a shame but on whole, I still somewhat enjoyed it.

I would like to thank Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Kim Fu for sending me this ARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

A summer camp for young girls aged nine to twelve. Mostly rich, but there are also some poor ones granted scholarships so that they can take part, too. The rules have been the same over decades, everything in Camp Forevermore is as it has always been. Part of the camp experience is a kayak tour which the girls complete in small groups and which leaves them on isolated islands for a night. Siobhan, Nita, Andee, Isabel and Dina thus are assigned to the oldest and toughest camp supervisor. Yet, unexpectedly, the girls do not end in the spot they were destined to but find themselves on a different, much larger and completely isolated island, their chaperone dead and they themselves running out of food. Now, the real survival lesson begins.

The idea of a bunch of girls having to face raw nature and survive in unknown territory sounded quite intriguing to me. I anticipated it to be a bit like a girl version of the “Lord of the Flies” and I was curious to read how a group of girls develops under those conditions. Yet, the story of the lost girls is just a part of the novel. Their adventure is broken up by narrations about what happens to the girls later in life, their fate after surviving Camp Forevermore. This not only came a bit unexpected, but also shifted the focus away from the actual story to what such an experience makes with people and how they can never really get over it.

Kim Fu has a very lively style of writing. The characters seem authentic and you quickly get a good idea of their different personalities. I liked her writing most in the parts where the girls struggle to survive, she is great at portraying their fears, hate and desperation. Without any question, the girls’ later lives are also interesting and the author actually did a great job in developing the girls further as adults. However, I would have preferred to read more about Camp Forevermore and the girls desperate situation.

Starting out, I was definitely getting Mean Girls meats Lord Of The Flies vibes. Which is certainly not a bad thing! I was hooked right from the start. The book is structured starting out with camp, and then flashing forward to different snippets of the girls’ lives Post Incident, and then flashing back to camp. Every so often, I was sort of confused as to where I was in the story… but as I read it became easier and easier to follow as I got used to the interesting story-telling method. Keeping it jumping all over the place like that definitely supported the thriller-y/mysterious atmosphere of the plot. I thought this was a really interesting read! Seeing the way a childhood event could affect people so differently in the future was fascinating and I would definitely suggest it as a summer time book to anyone who enjoys YA psychological contemporaries.

This feels like this will be a quick read, but I will not be continuing. It has a very choppy start, bouncing around different character perspectives and activities too quickly for me to want to keep going.

Fun book but a bit hard to follow with all the POV changes. I would definitely recommend it to friends, and it was a cute story of summer camp.

*Thanks to NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.* As a child, I grew up reading books set in boarding schools and summer camp and loved them. Neither of these are common in Australia, hence the allure of these settings. Thus, the title 'The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore' grabbed my attention instantly. However, if I was expecting a feel-good novel about campfire sing-a-longs and toasting marshmallows... I was going to be rather surprised. Instead, Kim Fu has crafted a rather intense and brooding novel about a camp that goes horribly wrong and the lives of all of those affected. Despite not being the fun-filled romp I was expecting, still a fascinating read, with intriguing characters.

This story starts with a group of girls who get lost on a summer-camp outing. The outing goes wrong, and the girls struggle to find their way of the bad situation as the author flashes us forward to the “Lost Girls'” subsequent lives as adults. At one point, a parent is told not to worry, that “you would be surprised what children can forget.” But in truth, this book is about what children can remember, and how those memories shape their lives.

With thanks to NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy, and to the author and publisher as well.

I enjoyed "The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore" and found it a very quick read. That said, it was not what I expected based on the NatGalley description. Five girls, aged 9 to 11, meet at Camp Forevermore and after a few days kayak out to a remote island, with a chaperone/counselor (Jan), for an overnight campout. THings go wrong, and the girls are lost without adult help, hiking through an island searching for help. This story is interspersed with stories of the girls as young adults long after this experience, but exhibiting the ways that the camping-trip-gone-wrong affected their personalities and lives through the intervening years. I found the novel read more like short stories. Their lives did not really intersect after the tragic week and seemed disjointed and unfinished. I did enjoy the novel, and think it would be a great read for a book discussion group, as there is much to talk about. I'm sure it will stick with me for quite some time.

I took too long to read and the book expired on Overdrive before I got to it. Sorry, but thanks for the chance to read it.

It's been a while since I DNF'd a book. I hate doing that because I keep thinking, "what if it had gotten better?"

But I just couldn't read this one anymore. The story starts with these four girls who are in a camp together. And then the next chapter goes on to tell the future of one of those girls. Then another 'in the camp' chapter followed by another girl's story.

I read half of the book before finally giving up. I just couldn't see the point of reading all of it. The past and the future, there were no connections. And it was getting quite boring. So, after a long struggle, I gave up.

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore was, quite unfortunately, just not for me.