Camp Girls
Fireside Lessons on Friendship, Courage, and Loyalty
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author Iris Krasnow reflects with humor and heart on her summer camp experiences and the lessons she and her fellow campers learned there that have stayed with them throughout their lives.
Iris Krasnow was 8 years old when she first attended sleep-away camp, building lasting friendships and essential life skills amid the towering pine trees and open skies of Wisconsin. Decades later, she returned to Camp Agawak as a staff member to help resurrect Agalog, the camp's defunct magazine that she wrote for as a child. There, she revisits the activities she loved as a young girl: singing songs around a campfire, swimming in a pristine lake, sleeping under the stars—experiences that continue to fill her with wisdom and perspective.
A nostalgic, inspiring memoir with a universal message on the importance of long-term friendship for campers and non-campers alike, Camp Girls weaves between past and present, filling the page in delicious detail with cabin pranks, canoe trips in rainstorms, and the joy of finding both your independence and your interdependence in nature alongside your peers. Through rich storytelling, Iris shares her own and other campers' adventures and the lessons from childhood that can shape fulfilling and successful adulthoods. Ultimately, Iris powerfully demonstrates that camp is more than a place or a collection of activities: it's where we learn what it means to be human and what it feels like to truly belong to a family—not of blood, but of history, loyalty, and tradition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krasnow (Surrendering to Motherhood) recounts in her charming memoir the many life lessons learned while attending Wisconsin's Camp Agawak, a sleep-away girl's summer camp, from the age of eight in 1963. "All that is very adventurous, very sentimental, very brave, and very naughty about who I am today was birthed and nurtured there," she explains. Toggling between past and present, Krasnow describes growing up in the Chicago suburbs as the daughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor, and notes that summers at Camp Agawak in the wilds of Wisconsin sowed the seeds for her life as a newspaper reporter and then as an author, and instilled in her kindness, responsibility, a sense of ambition, a desire to contribute to the greater good of a community, and taught her to remain steadfast during tough times. Krasnow also writes movingly of her close-knit community of alumni campers, who still maintain close ties to Camp Agawak as they support each other through such ordeals as breast cancer, the suicide of a sibling, and the death of a spouse. This is a thoroughly enjoyable dip into nostalgia for the simpler times of youth.
