An amusing, romantic, and uplifting YA tale.
In Hergenrader’s (Love Rules, 2016, etc.) YA novel, a young woman becomes the summer director at a Christian summer camp that seems to be on its last legs.
Poppi Savot, 19, dropped out of her freshman semester at the University of Minnesota, distracted by grief over her mother’s death from breast cancer. Her well-meaning father is struggling with alcoholism, so she needs to find a full-time job to get by. Recalling happy memories of her Christian summer camp, she finds an opening as a summer director at a similar place, Camp Eden in Southern California; she muses that it’ll be warm there and also “far from home and memories and failure.” When she arrives at the camp, she feels immediately at home, but the executive director, Bryan Simes, gives her bad news: Camp Eden is struggling financially and will close by the end of that summer, as it’s being sold to a corporation. Poppi could go home, but she feels that Eden is where she’s meant to be. She finds new allies in the 17-year-old camp counselors and particularly Jake Bass, a college sophomore who’s in charge of the male staff. As Poppi comes to terms with the difficulties and pleasures of her new responsibilities, she mourns her mother and struggles with her faith: “I feel about God the way I feel about my own dad. He seems unreliable.” Jake is intriguing, she thinks, but he might turn out to be unreliable, too. Still, despite the odds, Poppi and her helpers do their best to try to save the camp. Hergenrader nicely captures the friendships, games, problems, and atmosphere of summer camps, Christian ones in particular, such as when counselors groan at the thought of another God’s-eye craft project. Characters give thoughtful consideration to their religious beliefs, and Hergenrader does an especially good job of tracing Poppi’s evolving understanding of God’s will. The characters lack diversity, but they do exhibit a range of economic backgrounds. There’s some sentimentality in the novel’s idyllic presentation of summer camps in general, and there’s little suspense regarding whether things will work out in the end. Importantly, though, Poppi shows personal and spiritual maturity as she becomes willing to accept the possibility of failure.
An amusing, romantic, and uplifting YA tale.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7586-5713-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Concordia Publishing House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The literary equivalent of comfort food in a tale of middle- aged love in Mitford, a fictional North Carolina small town: a novel that restores rather than provokes as it deftly portrays men and women caught up in the human condition. Like its popular predecessors (At Home in Mitford and A Light in the Window, not reviewed), the author's latest celebrates the lives of several Mitford citizens while offering vignettes of many more. As the story opens, 60ish Episcopalian Rector Father Tim Kavanagh has just returned from his honeymoon. A longtime bachelor, he is touchingly surprised by the joy marriage to neighbor Cynthia has brought him. Cynthia, a children's book author and illustrator, is not, however, a traditional clergyman's wife—a shocking bit of news for Tim's secretary Emma and the Episcopal Church Women. Thanks, though, to a splendid parish tea party—a tea for which Cynthia redecorates the rectory and provides delicious food—the ladies are mollified. In the year that passes, the holidays (both religious and secular) are celebrated; the community reaffirms its identity; and the deaths of the town's oldest inhabitant and of a child are balanced by the birth of twins to Tim's young housekeeper. Meanwhile, though the setting is pastoral and the people good-hearted, Mitford is as subject to change and horror as the outside world. Misogynist J.C., the editor of the local paper, amazes the townsfolk by marrying Mitford's first woman police officer; Lacey, a young girl, though badly beaten by her father, refuses to leave home because she must care for her bedridden mother; Pauline Barlowe is set on fire by the man she lives with; and Tim's faith is sorely tested and then reaffirmed. Such a small canvas framed by faith could easily be smug and anodyne, but it's not: Karon is one of those rare writers who can depict the good and the ordinary without being boring or condescending. A book to curl up with. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86934-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Loose sequel to Quinn's debut novel, Ishmael (1992), the odd and controversial winner of the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Award. In Ishmael, a young neophyte more or less accidentally apprenticed himself to a great talking ape, allowing Quinn to string together a series of Socratic dialogues on mankind's woes. Here, the device is much the same. We meet a young Laurentian priest, Jared Osbourne, who notes early on that the Laurentians still observe an old injunction: to watch for the appearance of the Antichrist. Jared is sent by his superior to investigate an itinerant European preacher known as B, a.k.a. Charles Atterley. Atterley isn't satanic in the least, however, nor even very religious, so the ``Antichrist'' tag is just a platform for Quinn to do his own preaching, which is reminiscent of the ape's declamations in Ishmael. When B is assassinated for his views, it makes little sense in terms of the plot, since all B does is talk (and talk)—he doesn't cast spells or plot world dominion. He talks about how primitive cultures were divided up into ``Leavers'' and ``Takers,'' how these ancient archetypes are still working themselves out, and how overpopulation will, in the next century, come near to obliterating us all. Modern agriculture, which Quinn thinks of as ``totalitarian'' because it's so divorced from nature, will not address the needs of 12 billion people (the UN estimate of how many of us there will be by 2040). The novel's format is artificial and far-fetched, but no matter: The author writes a facile, clear prose, and the ideas he wants to discuss are admittedly important. Quinn is a provocative thinker. Imagine a combination of Robert M. Pirsig for style, Ayn Rand for cardboard characters on soapboxes, and the Unabomber for a nature-centered but slightly menacing feel. The combination equals Quinn, and makes for a helluva rant.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-553-10053-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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