Camp – Kayla Miller | Hit or Miss Books

Camp by Kayla Miller

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars
Received: Library
Published: 2019
Publisher: HMH BFYR
Recommended Age: 7+
Genres & Themes: Middle Grade, Graphic Novel, Friendship Dynamics, Summer Camps, Social Isolation

REVIEW:

It was good to spend some time with Olive again. In the first graphic novel, she had trouble expressing her creative side and communicating with her friend groups. In this companion, she and her good friend Willow are away at camp. Everything is going well in the beginning. Olive and Willow are sticking together but Olive wants to branch out a little and try different things, talk to more people, whereas Willow wants to stick with the familiar.

The girls are drifting apart while at camp and once again Olive struggles to communicate how she feels and to understand Willow’s perspective of things. Thankfully, the camp monitors are there to help and monitor the whole situation.

I enjoyed this one a little more than the first book because I adore summer camp stories, and having been to day camp when I was a kid, I can tell you that it is a very interesting experience. So I was excited to see what Olive and Willow would be up to.

I do however feel like this is the kind of story that would have worked just as well or maybe even better as a regular novel instead of the graphic one. I rarely felt like the illustrations were necessary, only when Olive and her friends were creating something, because that’s always interesting to see. But that just proves that we create what we want, not what we feel we need to in order to please someone.

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