Camp

by Elaine Wolf

Overview

For most girls, sleepaway camp is great fun. But for Amy Becker, it’s a nightmare. Amy, whose home life is in turmoil, is sent to Camp Takawanda for Girls for the first time as a teenager. Although Amy despises spending summers at home with her German-immigrant mother, who is unduly harsh with Amy’s autistic younger brother, Amy is less than thrilled about going away to camp. And her reluctance about camp is only the beginning. At Takawanda Amy finds herself subjected to a humiliating “initiation” and also to relentless bullying by Rory, the ringleader of the senior campers.

As Amy struggles to stop the mean girls from tormenting her, she becomes more confident. But then her cousin reveals dark secrets about Amy’s mother’s past, setting in motion a tragic event that changes Amy and her family forever.

Winner of the Forward National Literature Award and a book-of-the-month pick by the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County (NY), Camp is an acutely sensitive and compelling novel that will resonate with a wide readership.

Sky Pony Press, with our Good Books, Racehorse and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of books for young readers—picture books for small children, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and novels for young adults. Our list includes bestsellers for children who love to play Minecraft; stories told with LEGO bricks; books that teach lessons about tolerance, patience, and the environment, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620874400
Publisher:	Sky Pony
Publication date:	06/15/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

Elaine Wolf is an award-winning fiction writer, a former reading/language arts specialist and school district program administrator, and a writing workshop facilitator. As the daughter of a German immigrant, and as a former camper and camp counselor, she writes of a world she is passionate about and knows well. With an exceptional reputation as “the anti-bullying novelist,” she shows what really goes on behind the closed gates and doors of our camps and schools. Learn more about Elaine at authorelainewolf.com. Elaine and her husband live in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 I Hate Her 1

Chapter 2 The Requirement of Perfection 7

Chapter 3 Boys on the Brain 29

Chapter 4 Please Don't Let Them Hurt Me 41

Chapter 5 A Little Fun with the New Girl 53

Chapter 6 I'd Rather Eat Worms 59

Chapter 7 I'm Not Fooling with You Now 73

Chapter 8 An Eye for an Eye 85

Chapter 9 It's Just a Package 93

Chapter 10 The Laughingstock of Senior Camp 105

Chapter 11 Indecent Behavior 113

Chapter 12 It's Our Secret 127

Chapter 13 Scrawnier than a Month Ago 139

Chapter 14 A Liar and a Misfit 159

Chapter 15 What in the World Is Wrong with You? 171

Chapter 16 Enough! 183

Chapter 17 You Don't Know Anything 189

Chapter 18 I Opened the Lid 195

Chapter 19 How Was This Possible? 209

Chapter 20 Tell Me What Happened 219

Chapter 21 Pick Up the Pieces 229

A Note from the Author 235

Acknowledgments 237

Editorial Reviews

Fourteen-year-old Amy Becker dreads being sent to her Uncle Ed's sleepaway camp in Maine—she worries that she won't make friends and hates the idea ?of leaving her autistic younger brother, Charlie, with her chilly and image-?conscious mother. After Amy arrives at camp, a cruel camper named Rory taunts her at every occasion and puts her through a mortifying "initiation, " stripping Amy naked in front of two boys and throwing her in the lake. Meek and naïve, Amy has to lose her self-pity, boost her self-esteem, and make a friend to survive. While bullying is the focus of Wolf's debut novel, the author throws in a wide range of additional dramas and tragedies (extramarital affairs, abandoned children, death) that overwhelm the narrative. In the last quarter of the book, Wolf works to explain Amy's mother's troubled history and tie up loose ends, but there's little to establish the book's historical setting (1962) and Amy's mother's German heritage, both of which end up being important to the plot. Ages 13–16. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Gr 6–8—Sent off in the summer of 1962 to Camp Takawanda, Amy Becker, 14, misses her autistic younger brother, Charlie, and her father, but not her carping German-immigrant mother, Sonia. Life at camp takes its toll when Amy becomes the target of bunkmate Rory's bullying. With lax adult supervision and Amy's inability to speak up for herself, Rory and her followers gain the power to intimidate Amy and rudely challenge counselors. On family visiting day, after Rory ingratiates herself to ingenuous Sonia and terrifies Charlie with a barking dog, Amy and her two friends decide to fight back and hope that Amy's Uncle Ed, owner of the camp, will send Rory home. To her credit, Amy attracts the attention of Andy from a nearby boys' camp and becomes an accomplished tennis player. Details of life in the early '60s add dimension to a plot that is rife with secrets about Rory, Uncle Ed, Sonia, and Amy's cousin Robin. Resolution comes in a melodramatic rush involving Amy's stealthy search through her mother's papers, Charlie's death after being hit by Sonia's car, a relocation to Connecticut, and Sonia's struggle with cancer, when she finally reveals to Amy details of her sad past. In a story told in retrospect as she is about to head to college, Amy is able to forgive her once-secretive mother.—Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT

School Library Journal