Synopses & Reviews
From the award-winning author of For Today I Am a Boy, a gripping and deeply felt novel about a group of young girls at a remote camp—and the night that changes everything and will shape their lives for decades to come.
A group of young girls descend on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. Filled with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home.
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore traces these five girls — Nita, Andee, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan — through and beyond this fateful trip. We see them through successes and failures, loving relationships and heartbreaks; we see what it means to find, and define, oneself, and the ways in which the same experience is refracted through different people. In diamond-sharp prose, Kim Fu gives us a portrait of friendship and of the families we build for ourselves — and the pasts we can't escape.
Review
"Sharp...Readers will delight in the complicated, brash, ugly, and sincere presentation of Fu’s characters." Booklist
Review
"Fu's characters are rich, real, and distinct...With rawness and objectivity, Fu depicts the women these girls become along with their struggles, both cosmic and mundane...An ambitious and dynamic portrayal of the harm humans — even young girls — can do." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is a sensitive, evocative exploration of how the past threads itself through our lives, reemerging in unexpected ways. Kim Fu skillfully measures how long and loudly one formative moment can reverberate." Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere
Review
"A gripping survival story about the lives of six diverse women....The fascinating thing about the book is clocking the ways this traumatic experience in the woods touches each woman's life....Though the tragedy and subsequent fallout at Camp Forevermore affected each woman's life differently, and though their lives diverge as often as they intertwine, they share a resilience Fu embeds into the structure of her sentences. She builds them short, clean, and straightforward. This consistency gives her the ability to drop an extremely intense image or profound line out of nowhere, create convincing cliff-hangers, or slowly increase the stakes of a scene until you feel like a frog in suddenly boiling water. But the great achievement of the novel is the way Fu renders her characters. These portraits of sisterhood, motherhood, daughterhood, wifehood, girlfriendhood, independent womanhood, and other female-identified-hoods sing and groan and scream with complexity and nuance, and they make me want to read her next 10 books." The Stranger
Synopsis
From the award-winning author of For Today I Am a Boy, a gripping and deeply felt novel about a group of young girls at a remote camp--and the night that changes everything and will shape their lives for decades to come A group of young girls descend on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. Filled with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home.
The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore traces these five girls--Nita, Andee, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan--through and beyond this fateful trip. We see them through successes and failures, loving relationships and heartbreaks; we see what it means to find, and define, oneself, and the ways in which the same experience is refracted through different people. In diamond-sharp prose, Kim Fu gives us a portrait of friendship and of the families we build for ourselves--and the pasts we can't escape.
About the Author
Kim Fu is the author of the novel For Today I Am a Boy, which won the Edmund White Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Fu is also the author of the poetry collection How Festive the Ambulance. She lives in Seattle, Washington.
Kim Fu on PowellsBooks.Blog
Some recent research suggests that the human brain actively suppresses or erases memories, and there are pathways and proteins that are dedicated to forgetting. That in turn implies that forgetting is adaptive, perhaps necessary for learning new information or staying sane. For me, it’s a counterintuitive idea. Forgetting so often feels like failure...
Read More»