Stories of inner lives after sleepover camp trauma
They were girls on the cusp of their teens, brimming with toxic femininity as they vied for their place in the hierarchy of sleepaway summer camp.
Siobhan, the needy know-it-all; Dina, the beauty; Andee, “one of the scholarship girls”; Nita, the bully; and the painfully introverted Isabel are thrown together for an overnight kayak trip to a nearby island.
But what should have been an unforgettable adventure takes a tragic turn, leaving the five girls aged nine to 11 to fend for themselves.
The ordeal unfolds throughout Kim Fu’s sophomore novel, “The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore,” interspersed among a collection of linked stories about the women these girls have become. More Alice Munro than female “Lord of the Flies,” the focus of Lost Girls is the inner lives of these girls as women, in the aftermath of this traumatic childhood event.
As varied as the girls themselves, the repercussions range from profound to barely perceptible as the five move through life. And in luminous yet accessible prose, she follows the character flaws that led the tween quintet into peril as those flaws play out in their adult lives.
In recounting the event itself, Fu offers an unblinking view of the social and emotional survival of the fittest that all too often marks the female coming of age.
Fu won widespread acclaim for her debut novel, “For Today I Am A Boy,” including the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. It was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice in 2014 and was a finalist for both the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction.
She again mines deep meaning from the everyday, casting a discerning eye on those easily recognizable female archetypes. With some of the characters, though, the archetypes fail to move much beyond stereotypes, despite Fu’s beautiful rendering. And short shrift is given to arguably the main character, Siobhan, through whose brooding preteen eyes most of the camp event unfolds.
“The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore” is a worthwhile read, if not quite the deep emotional dive she took in her debut novel.