Camp So-and-So

by Mary McCoy

Overview

The letters went out in mid-February.

Each letter invited its recipient to spend a week at Camp So-and-So, a lakeside retreat for girls nestled high in the Starveling Mountains. Each letter came with a glossy brochure with photographs of young women climbing rocks, performing Shakespearean theatre under the stars, and spiking volleyballs. Each letter was signed in ink by the famed and reclusive businessman and philanthropist, Inge F. Yancey IV.

By the end of the month, twenty-five applications had been completed, signed, and mailed to a post office box in an obscure Appalachian town.

Had any of these girls tried to follow the directions in the brochure and visit the camp for themselves on that day in February, they would have discovered that there was no such town and no such mountain and that no one within a fifty-mile radius had ever heard of Camp So-and-So.

"The DNA of this singular book winds strands of M. C. Escher, Joss Whedon, and Heathers—Mary McCoy has created something wonderful, wild, and weird. Don't miss it."—Martha Brockenbrough, author of The Game of Love and Death

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512434286
Publisher:	Lerner Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	424
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	13 - 17 Years

About the Author

Mary McCoy lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. She works as a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. She is the author of Printz Honor Book I, Claudia.

Editorial Reviews

"All the world's a stage in this . . . crafty, and, yes, campy novel that plays with familiar themes before it subverts them. Pure weird entertainment from start to finish."—starred, Booklist

From the Publisher

01/01/2017
Gr 7 Up—If a friend went away to summer camp and came back a different person, it might be easy to assume it was because she had made new friends and had had new experiences. But what if there were more sinister reasons? The 25 campers who arrive at Camp So-and-So expect hiking, rowing, and other normal camp activities, but they soon become involved in increasingly weird and potentially dangerous circumstances, and there are no responsible adult figures to be found. The girls, divided into five cabins, must fend for themselves and navigate through a tangled thicket of clues and deadly traps. There is a psychotic murderer to be eluded, a heroic quest to be pursued, the intoxicating promise of true love, and dark forces at work that can split souls. The strong protagonists and supporting characters grow gradually more courageous as they confront every challenge, supernatural and otherwise. The cleverly built structure divides the narrative into acts, and scenes within the acts tell the tale of each cabin separately, until they all converge in one dramatic conclusion. VERDICT A wildly imaginative novel with plenty of twists, this is a good pick for teens who like stories filled with bravery and dark magic.—Emma Burkhart, formerly at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy, Philadelphia

School Library Journal

2016-12-14
Camp is supposed to be about arts and crafts, capture the flag, and lazy days swimming in the lake, but at Camp So-and-So, nothing is as it's supposed to be, or even as it seems.Several mysteries await the 25 female campers whose parents make the drive up the "unnecessarily winding road" to the five cabins that don't even have walls. They've been tempted with shiny brochures that offer a week of fun and friends, but when they arrive, they're greeted by a problem, the nature of which depends on which cabin they've been assigned to. The mystery about Camp So-and-So deepens the longer the girls are trapped, and trapped they are, a fact that dawns on them as they find little help in the form of adult supervision. McCoy has written a downright peculiar book that manages to deliver a compelling tale of friendship and survival. The characters—which include at least two young black women and two lesbians—are easy to distinguish and follow, even as the narrative is required to dive into different scenes. A self-consciously omniscient narrator is a helpful technique that folds well into the plot. A loose relationship with A Midsummer Night's Dream helps explain the hazier bits, though knowledge of Shakespeare isn't required to enjoy the book. Weird, fun, clever, and different—in a good way. (Fiction. 14-18)

Kirkus Reviews