Night Owls and Summer Skies

Gr 6-10–Seventeen-year-old Emma Lane expected to spend the summer after high school sniping with her flighty, homophobic mother. Emma never assumed her mother would dump her at the same summer camp where Emma developed anxiety, rooming with the bully who originally caused her panic. Desperate to get kicked out of camp and sent home to her dad, Emma is surprised to learn that, with the right friends, Camp Mapplewood can be a place of renewal and maybe even romance with her hot, sarcastic camp counselor Vivian. While it is refreshing to read a LGBTQ love story starring three girls who do not identify as straight, this book leaves readers wanting more. In its attempts to normalize anxiety, panic attacks, and PTSD—a worthy effort—the book makes Emma seem inconsistent. On one page, she is shy, awkward, and can barely speak from fear, and just a few pages later she is openly, easily flirting with a girl she just met. The two-dimensional secondary characters might be overlooked for a fast-paced plot or strong writing, but the slow, plodding storyline and choppy sentence structure mean this story struggles to keep the reader’s attention.