Camp and Book Blogger Challenge Part 10

How I choose what to read next is pretty simple, my stacks of books are organized in order of when to read them.  It order goes; Library Book/ARC/Library Book/Personal Buy.  The only time my order is overridden is for; summer reading, school reading, Lucky Day Books at the library, books I need to read before the movie comes out, ARC tours, and books I’m reading with a friend.  It may seem like that order gets overridden a lot, but not really! 😀

How I get my stacks is pretty simple; library books I browse for at the library, or request.  Personal books I buy when I really want to read them, or happen upon them at a bookstore, ARC’s are usually given to me to read/review, and summer/school reading I have to choice about! 

Every secret has a price.

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 swears she hates her German-immigrant mother, who is unduly harsh with Amy’s autistic younger brother, Amy is less than thrilled about going to camp. At Takawanda she is subjected to a humiliating “initiation” and relentless bullying by the ringleader of the senior campers. As she struggles to stop the mean girls from tormenting her, Amy becomes more confident. Then a cousin reveals dark secrets about Amy’s mother’s past, which sets in motion a tragic event that changes Amy and her family forever.

Wolf writes this book very plainly, nothing about it was special or terrible.  The ongoing mystery of why Amy’s mother is so cold keeps the story going, but just barely.  Wolf also makes the bully seem bigger than she was; a typical mean girl. In a word, it was pretty boring.

I barely want to even get into this…

Amy was not an interesting character.  She let people bully her, she never questioned her mother, or talked about her mother’s affair.  The only thing about her that makes her different is her fierce love for her brother Charlie.  When her mother suddenly gets cancer, Amy is quick to forgive, which is uncharacteristic for someone who had a lifetime of emotional abuse.

Amy’s carried a lot of secrets.  She was cold, bitter, and could not bring herself to love the two wonderful children she was given after losing her first.  Although the emotional trauma is understandable, the fact that she had more children without the capacity to love is not.

Everything in this book was blown out of proportion, the characters were boring, and then one interesting aspect gets wrapped up before it barely begins.  

~Remy