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Published Feb 2018
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"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.
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.
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