Liz Moore's mystery The God of the Woods begins with the disappearance of a girl from fictional Camp Emerson, a summer camp for children in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

For many children, attending summer camp is a rite of passage. According to a 2023 Newsweek article, there are over 12,000 summer camps across the United States, and some 20 million children—around 40 percent of children ages 6 to 18—attend at least one camp annually. Hundreds of different kinds of experiences are available now, with some catering to outdoor activities, some to arts and crafts, others to learning about potential careers such as robotics or computer programming.

Most historians believe the first summer camp in the United States was established at the end of the Civil War. Educator and abolitionist Frederick Gunn ran a boarding school in Washington, Connecticut, and in 1861 he decided to take his pupils on a character-building field trip of sorts. He marched about 40 ...