Starred Review ALA Booklist (Thu Dec 01 00:00:00 CST 2011)

Starred Review It begins with a preadolescent kiss between protagonist Cameron and her friend, Irene. The very next day Cameron's parents die in an automobile accident, and the young girl is left riddled with guilt, feeling her forbidden kiss was somehow responsible for the accident. This is an old convention of GLBT literature, but freshly handled here and given sophisticated thematic weight. As Cameron grows into her teenage years, she recognizes that she is a lesbian. After several emotional misadventures, she meets and falls in love with the beautiful Coley, who appears to be bisexual. Both girls attend the same fundamentalist church, and when Cameron's conservative Aunt Ruth discovers the affair, she remands Cameron to God's Promise, a church camp that promises to "cure" young people of their homosexuality. Such "religious conversion therapy" is rooted in reality, and Cam's experiences at the camp are at the heart of this ambitious literary novel, a multidimensional coming-of-age reminiscent of Aidan Chambers' equally ambitious This Is All (2006). There is nothing superficial or simplistic here, and Danforth carefully and deliberately fleshes out Cam's character and those of her family and friends. Even the eastern Montana setting is vividly realized and provides a wonderfully apposite background for the story of Cam's miseducation and the challenges her stint in the church camp pose to her development as a mature teenager finding friendship and a plausible future.

Starred Review for Kirkus Reviews

Set in rural Montana in the early 1990s, this lesbian coming-of-age story runs the gamut from heart-rending to triumphant, epic to mundane. The story opens just after Cameron's first kiss with a girl and just before the life-changing news that Cameron's parents have died in a car accident. Cam is 12 when readers first meet her, but several years pass over the course of the book's nearly 500 pages. Carefully crafted symbols--a dollhouse into which Cam puts stolen trinkets and mementos, the lake where her mother once escaped disaster only to die there 30 years later--provide a backbone for the story's ever-shifting array of characters and episodes, each rendered in vibrant, almost memoirlike detail. The tense relationship between Cam's sexuality and her family and community's religious beliefs is handled with particular nuance, as are her romantic and sexual entanglements, from a summer fling with an out, proud and smug Seattlite to an all-encompassing love for a seemingly straight female friend. Even when events take a dark and gut-punchingly inevitable turn, the novel remains at its heart a story of survival and of carving out space even in a world that wants one's annihilation. Rich with detail and emotion, a sophisticated read for teens and adults alike. (Fiction. 14 & up)

School Library Journal Starred Review (Thu Mar 01 00:00:00 CST 2012)

Gr 10 Up-When 12-year-old Cam learns that her parents have died in a car accident, her first reaction is relief that they will never know that just hours before she was kissing her best friend, Irene. Shortly after the funeral, her conservative aunt moves to Miles City, MN, to help Cam's grandmother with the caregiving, but all the churchgoing and discipline they can marshal throughout Cam's teen years can't prevent her from exploring her sexuality further, finally falling for Coley Taylor, a "straight" girl who wants to experiment. When they eventually get caught, Coley tells all, blaming everything on Cam, and Aunt Ruth sends her niece off to God's Promise, a conversion therapy school and camp. It is here that Cam meets gay teens like herself, and she begins to deal with the guilt and trauma of her adolescence, not through the pious teachings of the camp but through the love of her friends. This finely crafted, sophisticated coming-of-age debut novel is multilayered, finessing such issues as loss, first love, and friendship. An excellent read for both teens and adults.— Betty S. Evans, Missouri State University, Springfield

Horn Book (Wed Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2012)

Orphaned Cameron Post is attracted to other girls, especially the beautiful Coley Taylor. But when a remorseful Coley discloses their encounter to their fundamentalist church, Cameron finds herself sent to God's Promise, a Christian reparative therapy school. Exquisite attention to detail and a situation that invites reader identification mark this thoughtful coming-of-age novel set in 1980s Montana.

Kirkus Reviews (Fri Oct 04 00:00:00 CDT 2024)

Set in rural Montana in the early 1990s, this lesbian coming-of-age story runs the gamut from heart-rending to triumphant, epic to mundane. The story opens just after Cameron's first kiss with a girl and just before the life-changing news that Cameron's parents have died in a car accident. Cam is 12 when readers first meet her, but several years pass over the course of the book's nearly 500 pages. Carefully crafted symbols--a dollhouse into which Cam puts stolen trinkets and mementos, the lake where her mother once escaped disaster only to die there 30 years later--provide a backbone for the story's ever-shifting array of characters and episodes, each rendered in vibrant, almost memoirlike detail. The tense relationship between Cam's sexuality and her family and community's religious beliefs is handled with particular nuance, as are her romantic and sexual entanglements, from a summer fling with an out, proud and smug Seattlite to an all-encompassing love for a seemingly straight female friend. Even when events take a dark and gut-punchingly inevitable turn, the novel remains at its heart a story of survival and of carving out space even in a world that wants one's annihilation. Rich with detail and emotion, a sophisticated read for teens and adults alike. (Fiction. 14 & up)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

In Danforth-s impressive debut, a teenage girl processes her sexual awakening as a lesbian against the backdrop of her parents- sudden death in a car accident. Cam-s reckoning with her sexuality develops through a series of vignette-like early chapters that focus on the girls that come and go in Cam-s life-and there are several of them-creating narrative moments that will have teens rereading the sexy bits like an earlier generation did with Judy Blume-s Forever. The story is riveting, beautiful, and full of the kind of detail that brings to life a place (rural Montana), a time (the early 1990s), and a questioning teenage girl. Halfway through, the novel makes an abrupt turn when Cam-s secret is revealed, and her evangelical Aunt Ruth sends her off to God-s Promise, a residential school designed to help teens -break free from... sexual sin and confusion by welcoming Jesus Christ into their lives.- Danforth-s story gains even more complexity and dimension from this shift, further developing the political, religious, and coming-of-age themes introduced in the first half. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jessica Regel, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. (Feb.) -