Synopsis:
Summer camp is supposed to be about finding nirvana in a rock garden… But Elodie prefers Nirvana and Soundgarden. Can she confront rambunctious kids, confusing feelings, and supernatural horrors all at once?
Summer 1994: with just two months left before college, Elodie is forced by her mother to take a job as a camp counselor. She doesn’t know the first thing about nature, or sports, of kids for that matter, and isn’t especially interested in learning… but now she’s responsible for a foul-mouthed horde of red-headed girls who just might win her over, whether she likes it or not. Just as Elodie starts getting used to her new environment, though — and close to one of the other counselors — a dark mystery lurking around the camp begins to haunt her dreams.
Review:
I picked up Camp Spirit as I thought it would be a great summer read. I’d say this definitely has summer vibes as it’s set at a literal summer camp but my god was the pace slow. Camp Spirit is also a pretty long graphic novel. Half of the pages could have been cut out and not a lot would have changed. So many of the camp excursions felt like they were just repeating the same dialogue lines and character development. Does that make sense?
There were a lot of weird moments in Camp Spirit. The weirdest being Elodie, the camp monitor showering with the kids in her group. Is it normal for camp monitors to shower naked with the campers that are young children? I think not. These sections were really weird and made me a little uncomfortable. In hindsight I get that this scene was a way of setting up the ‘romance’ between Elodie and her love interest that I can’t remember the name of as they see each other naked, which is obviously the only way you can become attracted to someone (hint: that statement was heavy in sarcasm). This ‘romance’ felt incredibly forced and the constant fetishisation of them was gross.
Another character that was basically fetishised was the only character of colour. There’s a scene that has some of the kids touching her hair and she says something like “my hair feels different because I’m from somewhere else”. I’m sorry, what? It’s really disheartening to see something like this happening in a graphic novel anyway but in one that was released in 2020? Horrific.
Anyway, Elodie’s group were pretty funny even though they did ask a LOT of inappropriate questions – which is definitely something kids do but it was constant so got a little old after a while. They offered the comic relief that Camp Spirit sorely needed. This humour definitely lessened the further in I got, which didn’t help with the already slow pace.
I still don’t fully understand what the story was about. There were forest spirits and demons but these didn’t come into play until near the end and by that point I was so over what was going on I didn’t really care or pay enough attention to know what was happening. They also felt so out of place. If the idea of them had been hinted at throughout I would have been more intrigued but it felt like an afterthought that was put in to try and make this graphic novel at least a little bit interesting.
If you couldn’t tell from this review I didn’t enjoy Camp Spirit. Despite this I tried another graphic novel by this author and surprise, surprise I didn’t like that one either. I don’t think this author is for me.
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Thanks so much for your review – I would have picked this one up because of the cover.