- Publication Date: February 13, 2018
- Publisher: Harper Collins
- Special Features: None
- Pages: 248
- Genre: Fiction
- Price: $22.99 CAD\
- ISBN: 978-1-44345-359-2
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is about five young girls who ‘bond’ while at Camp, and find themselves lost and alone on an unknown island. The story follows Siobhan, Nita, Dina, Isabel and Andee. After the events are played out at Forevermore, we are taken through the journey of each girls lives through being a teenager to being adults. Except for Siobhan, and in a way Andee.
When I first read the summary, I thought I knew what I was getting into. I thought there was going to be more drama, and mystery to what happened on the island the five girls were camping at. Yes, while something traumatic did happen, I feel like their time alone and isolated on the island was actually quite short, and we didn’t really spend a lot of time there. But the main issue with the story? Nothing really grabbed my interest. As I was reading through the stages of each girls life, I didn’t get the sense that Camp Forevermore really had a strong impact on their lives. If anything, their home lives are what affected them fully, or mostly.
Nita’s and Andee’s story especially had no impact I felt from the camp. I believe their lives would have turned out the same when you realize what their home lives were like. With Nita, she started to change when she got injured, and that seemed to be what actually changed her personality. The girl we saw at Forevermore, pre-tragedy, was the same girl we saw after.
Andee’s chapter made no sense, in the way that it wasn’t narrated by her, but by her sister Kayla. The reasoning behind having her sister talk about their neglectful upbringing, and not have Andee do it, since this was suppose to be her story, made absolutely no sense. So I found it to be an extremely odd choice. If Kayla narrated the small part while Andee was away, that would have been different, but not the entire chapter.
Isabel and Dina later reconnect as adults. And while Dina did seem to have the most, if at all lasting effects from their tragic experience on the island, I felt Isabel too did not get affected by it. There by have been a brief mention that she’s more willing and wanting to help people, but Isabel’s up bringing through life is her just being obsessed with a boy from drama class for a very long time, and than eventually moves on. As if she were your typical teenager, not affected by a great tragedy. When it comes to Dina I feel like with her she is the only one who holds onto the memory of what happened to her on the island, and has let it affect her, but also her mother holds a big part as well.
Lastly Siobhan, who is the only one who did not get a chapter of her own, depicting her life growing up after Camp Forevermore. Her ‘chapter’ was a quick last minute tidy up of the book because it needed to end, because the girls time on the island was over. Siobhan’s upbringing was only one and a half pages that “explained” why she became a researcher in child psychology. But really, it felt like a rushed job to push us into thinking that her time on the island is what pushed her to choose that career path. Even in her very brief adult summary, I wasn’t convinced that she couldn’t have become that with or without the effects of Camp Forevermore.
The author failed to express how the tragedy of Forevermore changed the girls, and help shape who they would become as teenagers and later adults. None of them seemed to have lasting trauma, except for Dina. I chose not to count Siobhan and her career has a child psychology researcher because she was given no time at all to show or tell her story growing up, therefore you can not see for yourself how it shaped her. The choice the author made to have Kayla, Andee’s sister tell her story, and not have Andee no it herself made no sense, as if the author forgot who she was suppose to be writing about.
Overall rating: 1/5 stars.
Would I recommend: No. While I didn’t think the book was terrible, I found it boring and truthfully, uneventful. It failed to explain and hold up to what it promised in the summary.
Kat Reviews 