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Sunday, May 5, 2013

Highly Recommended Reading: "The Last Summer of the Camperdowns" by Elizabeth Kelly.




If sometime in the next few months you plan to be stretched out on a chair somewhere with a book, here is a title to consider:  The Last Summer of the Camperdowns by Elizabeth Kelly.  I greatly enjoyed this funny, scary, tense, and memorable novel.  

The novel takes place in the summer of 1972 on Cape Cod.  The protagonist is a 12-year-old girl, Riddle James Camperdown.  Riddle witnesses something dreadful and is terrorized into keeping what she saw a secret.  The secret and her fear reverberates, shaking loose other secrets, and changing Riddle and her parents forever.

Elizabeth Kelly's writing is fresh and energetic, and the plot structure is fantastic. Kelly creates incredible suspense and a long note of tension that is broken only at the very end of the book, when much of what we think we know gets turned onto its head.  At the very end, I had tears in my eyes and could only think one thing: Wow.

The Last Summer of the Camperdowns is a very good book and highly recommended reading.




   

1 comment:

  1. Just want to add that if you enjoyed reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, as I did, then I think you might also enjoy The Last Summer of the Camperdowns.

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