I attended summer camp for like 8 years as a kid and 4 summers as a counselor, and I really did love camp and think it was a really defining life experience for me in a lot of ways. And I'm very nostalgic about camp and very susceptible to camp stories, and so when I saw this I picked it up. I'm not familiar with any of Iris Krasnow's other books. Anyway, I didn't go to the kind of all summer 8-week long camp that Iris did, and there's a different vibe there, but...I like reading about camp.

I might have wished for any effort at all to make a modern reckoning of the way a lot of American camps primarily aimed at white campers appropriate/fake American Indian culture/traditions in a way that's...not great, not to mention her praising the virtues of single-sex activities without accounting for a full gender spectrum? (Which: no, wouldn't have been mainstream concerns when she was a camper back in the 60s/70s but she still works for a summer camp now?) Anyway--I understand that this is a nostalgia project and not her PhD dissertation of critical research on camp but it would have been nice to even slightly acknowledge anything along those lines.

But this is really just fully positive about how great summer camp was and is. So if you would like to indulge in some aggressive camp nostalgia, go for it. If you never went to camp, this is extremely not for you. It's also, I would say, not particularly for people in my age bracket. I think its target audience is basically women who, like Iris, came of age at summer camps in the 1960s/70s.