Twelve-year-old Abigail Hensley is a socially awkward aspiring anthropologist who has always had trouble connecting with her peers. Abigail is hopeful that a week at sleepaway camp is the answer to finally making a friend. After all, her extensive research shows that summer camp is the best place to make lifelong connections. Using her tried-and-true research methods, Abigail begins to study her cabinmates for friendship potential. But just when it seems that she is off to a good start, her bunkmate's phone gets stolen, and Abigail is the main suspect. Can she clear her name, find the real culprit, and make a friend before the week is done?
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**My thoughts**
Friendships are complicated, especially when you are in your tween years. Add to that being someone who is an academic genius who has skipped a couple of grades, and you really have your work cut out for you. Abigail has always struggled to have friends in her life. She knows what she is supposed to do on paper, but has a great deal of difficulty applying those concepts in real life. She also is extremely literal, which means she is often confused by her interactions with her peers. Honestly, she reminded me of someone on the autism spectrum.
Abigail is determined to make friends at summer camp this year. She goes about doing so in a methodical, scientific manner, attributing scores to her bunkmates via a matrix she has created to determine their worth as a friend. As expected, this does not go over too well, especially when the other girls find out what is going on. And add in a mystery as to who stole the forbidden phone brought in by one of the other girls, as well as some other shady happenings, and you get some interesting results.
From the friendship standpoint, I think a lot of kids will be able to relate to the difficulties of finding true friends during this trying years. Most of them are not going to go about it in the same way that Abigail does, but I think they will understand some of her confusion. I think they may also learn to be more tolerant of those kids whom they peg as "different" because of their intelligence or poorer social skills. Maybe they will learn how to communicate with some of those kids and find the value in befriending all kinds of people. The other girls at the camp learn how to do this. It's my favorite part of the whole book.
The mystery part is also a lot of fun, and definitely would have been right up my alley in my younger days. I admit that I didn't quite figure out who the culprit was until the end.
Overall, it was quite an enjoyable read. I gave it 4.5 stars.
Thank you to the publisher and to NetGalley for my review copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
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