The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is a stark portrait of what humans are capable of, of what they will do when faced with the prospect of death or survival. In an even larger way, this is a story that proves how one incident, something simple and shockingly short in comparison to a lifetime, can shape a life indefinitely. Anyone who enjoys literary or psychological fiction won’t be able to put this whip smart novel down.
Fu’s writing is beautiful and surprising, with images that leave a mark ... Forevermore is the first truly great novel I’ve read in 2018 ... Like the best fiction, Forevermore makes readers wonder what we would do in a similar situation, and it doesn’t provide any comforting answers.
The problem with Camp Forevermore is a fatal one — the action is too tame, the consequences too attenuated, the Mean Girls trope too predictable, for the set-up to pay off in any satisfyingly dramatic way. It's not Lord of the Flies, more like Girls Gone Mild ... The unhappy campers stay unhappy — quoth the raven — forevermore. Early trauma makes a satisfying life an impossibility — a fair point, though the trauma here seems too slight to carry so much weight.
The fascinating thing about the book is clocking the ways this traumatic experience in the woods touches each woman's life. Bad faith conversations about trauma so often flatten the nuances of survival—either you're cast as an oversensitive victim...or you're an impervious warrior ... But as Fu...breaks up the main narrative with the stories of the women these girls would become, we see a spectrum of responses to trauma ... 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.
In addition to recounting the nightmarish debacle, Fu’s sharp book is a study of the five girls later in life ... Readers will delight in the complicated, brash, ugly, and sincere presentation of Fu’s characters.
With rawness and objectivity, Fu depicts the women these girls become along with their struggles, both cosmic and mundane. Ultimately, Siobhan is the axis of the novel. Her story is given fewer pages and saved until last, but it resonates deeply and gives sharp focus to what came before. An ambitious and dynamic portrayal of the harm humans—even young girls—can do.
Fu's story is very much in this tradition, and the writing is rich, though somehow the bonds between the young women feel underdeveloped. Despite the mystery that moors Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, which makes for an engrossing novel, Fu’s characters also seem somewhat remote. The strongest chapter in the book isn’t about any of the small cadre of five girls at all; it’s about Andee’s sister Kayla. Fu’s writing shines here -- it is where she explores the cross sections of religion, misogyny, family ties, and class.
