CAMP PEOPLE

Vidulich presents an offbeat summer-vacation story about one woman’s emotional travails during her final year as a camp counselor.

Twenty-seven-year-old Paige Schilsky practically grew up at Mirror Lake, the summer camp where her parents met. But after five years as the director of Senior Camp for 13-to-15-year-olds(and five years after her parents’ deaths in a car accident), she must move on, according to her boss. It’s her last summer there, whether she likes it or not, so she’s busy looking for a new job, even as she’s up to her ears in camp activities. But she’s also determined to get through to a difficult camper who has the potential to be a good counselor. The most notable development is the return of Oliver Trevenen, with whom she has a fraught relationship; they end up having a summer fling and get each other to open up about the last few difficult years of their lives. Vidulich’s novel is surprising in its strong focus on emotion, such as how it feels to have to fire a staff member for getting high, and it makes readers feel for characters who make hard choices. It also explores pleasantly ordinary themes, such as Paige’s attachments to a place that was always meant to be somewhere that people leave, and the contradictions one faces while job-searching and grieving. The story is ultimately a devoted tribute to the spirit of camp with its sunny disposition and goofy characters: “There are two things I know about the world, and I learned both at summer camp,” states Paige in the first sentence, capturing the story’s essence from the start, which lasts to the final sentiment of how “two weeks can change a life forever.”

A heartwarming coming-of-age novel that will make readers fall in love with summer camp all over again.