Campfires
Eighteen-year-old Kaylen Sadler moves into a lakefront house near a family-owned campground in central Florida. Kaylen’s father, mostly absent while traveling for work, bought the property to give Kaylen more stability after having moved frequently during her childhood following the deaths of her mother and older brother. Kaylen is sad, lonely, and anxious for companionship.
Kaylen quickly befriends the teenage boys who work at the neighboring Crystal Lake campground—a tight-knit circle enamored of Kaylen’s beauty and engaging personality. They compete for her attention in typical raunchy, rambunctious teenage boy fashion, and even allow her into their “group” despite being a girl. The competition for Kaylen heats up between two of the boys and, along with their risky activity outside the campground, leads them down a dark and dangerous rabbit hole, revealing ugly secrets and shocking truths about the friends that Kaylen had trusted like brothers.
This is a suspenseful story with a slow buildup and extensive character/plot development that becomes a fast-moving page turner as a series of dark events, with Kaylen as the centerpiece, is irreversibly set in motion. This book is not really “historical fiction” per se. While the story takes place between 1969 and 1971, and includes random references to historical events of that period (Vietnam War and anti-war protests, Charles Manson, etc.) and some late ’60s pop culture, nothing about that era is materially woven into the plot. The story could have taken place at any time.
While the story is well-written with compelling imagery, the dialog between the teenagers can be stilted and unnatural; they often sound more like highly-educated, life-experienced John Updike or Jonathan Franzen characters than teens who work as laborers at a family campground (none of whom appear to attend high school or college despite ranging in age from 17 to 19).
