Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Book Summary and Reviews of The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore by Kim Fu

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore by Kim Fu

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore

by Kim Fu

  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Published:
  • Feb 2018, 256 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About this book

Book Summary

From the award-winning author of For Today I Am a Boy, a gripping and deeply felt novel about a group of young girls at a remote camp - and the night that changes everything and will shape their lives for decades to come.

A group of young girls descend on Camp Forevermore, a sleepaway camp in the Pacific Northwest, where their days are filled with swimming lessons, friendship bracelets, and camp songs by the fire. Filled with excitement and nervous energy, they set off on an overnight kayaking trip to a nearby island. But before the night is over, they find themselves stranded, with no adults to help them survive or guide them home.

The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore traces these five girls - Nita, Andee, Isabel, Dina, and Siobhan - through and beyond this fateful trip. We see them through successes and failures, loving relationships and heartbreaks; we see what it means to find, and define, oneself, and the ways in which the same experience is refracted through different people. In diamond-sharp prose, Kim Fu gives us a portrait of friendship and of the families we build for ourselves - and the pasts we can't escape.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

"Fu precisely renders the banal humiliations of childhood, the chilling steps humans take to survive, and the way time warps memory." - Publishers Weekly

"Sharp...Readers will delight in the complicated, brash, ugly, and sincere presentation of Fu's characters."- Booklist

"An ambitious and dynamic portrayal of the harm humans - even young girls - can do." - Kirkus

"The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is a sensitive, evocative exploration of how the past threads itself through our lives, reemerging in unexpected ways. Kim Fu skillfully measures how long and loudly one formative moment can reverberate." - Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

A vivid and haunting story of lives interrupted by tragedy. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore maps the journey from girlhood to womanhood, radiating both nostalgia and hope." - Hala Alyan, author of Salt Houses

"The five characters in Kim Fu's dark, deftly woven fable align and disperse like planets, bound in their separate orbits to a shared and perhaps definitive moment in time. Fu traces those orbits with a master astronomer's care and keen observation, mapping in strikingly clear and rich prose a hidden universe of girlhood and becoming." - Michelle Orange, author of This Is Running for Your Life

"Kim Fu has woven a story both expansive and intimate, charting the ways that five women who meet briefly as children will ultimately haunt one another for a lifetime. As in her first novel, she writes with a fierce, unflinching clarity about the myriad small guilts, cruelties, frailties, and betrayals we all carry with us. This book is one you won't soon forget." - Angelica Baker, author of Our Little Racket

"A startling and clear-sighted examination of the way a single event between children can become a galaxy of trauma, fate, and wonder that spins all the way through adulthood. The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is a thoroughly compelling story, and Kim Fu is an assured and intelligent guide." - Arna Bontemps Hemenway, author of Elegy on Kinderklavier

"I devoured The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore. Kim Fu lovingly circles around girlhood and womanhood, following the threads that connect old traumas to new ones, and the hurts that shape us, even when we wish they wouldn't. This is a novel that contains everything anyone could ever want: heartbreak, sly humour, bear cubs, and Fu's wise and steady hand to make sense of it all." - Jen Sookfong Lee, author of The Conjoined

This information about The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Author Information

Kim Fu Author Biography

Photo: L D'Alessandro.

Kim Fu is a Canadian-born writer living in Seattle, Washington. SHe is the author of For Today I Am a Boy which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. Her second novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award.

Fu's writing has appeared in Granta, the Atlantic, the New York Times, Hazlitt, enRoute, and the TLS. She has received residency fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Berton House, Wildacres, and the Wallace Stegner House.

Link to Kim Fu's Website

Other books by Kim Fu at BookBrowse
  • Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: The Book of George
    The Book of George
    by Kate Greathead
    The premise of The Book of George, the witty, highly entertaining new novel from Kate Greathead, is ...
  • Book Jacket: The Sequel
    The Sequel
    by Jean Hanff Korelitz
    In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Sequel, Anna Williams-Bonner, the wife of recently deceased author ...
  • Book Jacket: My Good Bright Wolf
    My Good Bright Wolf
    by Sarah Moss
    Sarah Moss has been afflicted with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa since her pre-teen years but...
  • Book Jacket
    Canoes
    by Maylis De Kerangal
    The short stories in Maylis de Kerangal's new collection, Canoes, translated from the French by ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

X M T S

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.