Rating: WORTHY!
This is an advance review copy that I got from Net Galley and for which I am very grateful to NG, the author, and the publisher for a chance to read. This was a great novel. There were some issues (when aren't there?!), but those were relatively minor and overall I consider this a very worthy read, and I enjoyed it immensely even though it certainly wasn't written for my age range!
The middle-grade novel is - refreshingly - not about your usual privileged white girl. It's about a Chinese girl who has been adopted into an American family. She has two acquaintances who are in the same shoes as she: adopted from China and living with American families. Whereas Julia seeks to embrace her new life, her two acquaintances, Avery and Becca also want to embrace their Chinese heritage.
This was where the first false note was struck for me. There was a huge dissonance between this theme of embracing one's heritage on the one hand, and the fact that all three girls, despite being born in China, did not have Chinese names. Avery, Becca, and Julia? Really?! There was no respect for their heritage there. Even if we assume that their American adoptees chose new names for them, could not those names have been Chinese? Just as badly, this was a slightly (yet not overbearingly) religiously-themed story. The camp was a Bible camp, but thankfully, the religious portion of it was very subdued. The problem I had with this was that most people in China are not Christian, yet this was the religion being imposed upon all three of these girls. Where was the respect for their heritage there? So those were two issues I had, but as I said, they were not deal-breakers for me, just issues which I felt could have been handled a lot better to avoid a suggestion of hypocrisy with regard to the theme of the story. There's far more to cultural heritage than adopting hobbies and affectations, and learning a language!
That said, I enjoyed the story because it felt authentic. It;ls base don the author's own experiences at camp, as the camp's music choices might suggest! The story was fun, amusing, entertaining, and moved at a good pace without feeling hurried. I enjoyed Julia's narration, even though I am not a fan of first person PoV stories. Her PoV felt realistic, and the argumentative nature of these girls, Julia and her Chinese "sisters" being crammed into a cabin at camp with three other girls, two of whom were rather snotty and elitist, was highly amusing, if a little disturbing now and then. Madeleine and Vanessa were over-achievers
who saw the win as all-important. Their foster-care 'cousin' Gina, who for me was the absolute favorite character, was a much more relaxed person who wanted to have fun at camp and didn't care if she was a winner or not.
Because of this tension, the girls start out the camp contests with a negative score! The tension continues to build until the girls are put on camp punishment and made to wash dishes after dinner. What happened then was hilarious and a real tension breaker, and you could truly feel the interpersonal relationships starting to turn around at that point, but they're still not out of the woods - so to speak. The story has delightful ups and downs and felt quite realistic.
That said, I've never been to one of these camps, and I have to say that I'm glad of it, if camps are like this. This was supposed to be a Christian camp, but it came off more like a prison camp. There was very little forgiveness and turning of the other cheek going on here, neither from the camp attendees, nor from those who ran the camp, which seemed rather hypocritical to me. Neither was there any attempt at all by the camp staff to teach these children anything about making friends, getting along, or amicably resolving disputes. It was all crime and punishment, and an endless run of competitive sports, like that's all there is in the world. I was saddened to think there may be camps like that, but it did make for an amusing atmosphere of us against them oppression, like some World War two stalag or a Soviet era gulag story! The punishments were punishing and seemed very un-christian-like to me. They did serve a purpose, however in the story.
So I had some issues, but overall, this story was great and I whole-heartedly recommend it for the appropriate age range (and a bit beyond!).
