Camp Lost and Found
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
Cassidy Clarke wants to find herself. Tasked with scattering her friend Mason’s ashes, she heads to the campground where they met as kids. She expects the grief. She expects the guilt. She expects how absent she feels in her own life. What she doesn’t expect is the broken disrepair of the campground. Or the grouchily broody, yet intriguingly beautiful, cabin manager. Francesca Sisto wants to lose herself. A deadly tragedy eight months ago has left her battered and guilt-ridden. The job at a rundown, very sparsely populated campground was supposed to keep her away from people. But when a very demanding and infuriatingly attractive guest keeps calling, she has no choice but to be a person and interact. They aren’t looking for love, they’re actively avoiding it. Nobody knows better than Cassidy and Frankie that life doesn’t always give you what you want. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, life gives you exactly what you need.
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This read wasn't an easy one, and I know I'm in the minority here. Usually with most things by Georgia Beers, I binge read it in a night. This one, I struggled to get through. It's an okay story, I just didn't feel a real spark between the main characters. We are introduced to Frankie, and she's the grinch of the camp. It baffles me how she can be upset that someone is going to stay at her camp. She's an employee OF the camp, not it's owner! I think that's where it started to go awry for me. There was no need to be such a grump. But - the second Frankie learns that Cassidy was a foster kid that had stayed at the camp way back when, that means instant love, and the melting of Frankie the Glacier and instant love. Everyone deals with grief differently, but I just don't buy that these two finding each other like this, finding immediate comfort through loss without really knowing each other at all, is the foundations of everlasting love. Perhaps in stereotypical lesbian fashion, uhaul/I love yous now, figure things out later—which is fine, if I actually felt real chemistry between these two.
A bigger issue for me was how subtle the reference to Cassidy being black. If you blink, you miss it. At first I was happy for some diversity. But then after thinking about it, it felt like you really had to look for the clues that she really is black, and it's not my brain inferring something wrong. I am a Latina woman, and I love seeing increased diversity in the kinds of stories I like to read, but this just left me a little unsettled in how it was done.
I liked the dog in the story, the dog's dad, and the neighbor kid. The scenes with them definitely made things more interesting. I liked Cassidy right away (at least with how she dealt with Frankie's crankiness), but Frankie never really grew on me.
This isn't my favorite Beers story, but I'll still be checking out whatever else she publishes, because more often than not, I do really enjoy her stories.
