Review: Cute Tween Tale of Terror
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 24, 2012
(cross posted from the blog Wading Through Electronic Ink)In Night Camp, Shane's parents are forcing him to go to summer camp, and in retaliation, he insists upon going to the strangest camp he can find - Night Camp, where campers sleep all day and explore the world at night. But soon after their arrival, Shane, his cousin Brad, and fellow camper Nicole begin to suspect that the people running the camp might be vampires.Overall I found Night Camp to be a cute and engaging story about the adventures of kids at a summer camp. It brought back lots of memories of my times at summer camp, and I found myself wishing that I too could have spent my summers living in a castle and exploring caves instead of the much more traditional cabins and canoeing that I remember. Of course, I was also grateful that I was not entirely cut off from adults and the outside world while at the mercy of people who I suspected might want to use my blood as a midnight snack.Night Camp was written for a younger audience than what I usually review, and I sometimes had a difficult time putting myself in the mindset of a younger child. If I were to encounter a vampire, I would immediately try to determine which of the many vampire mythologies in fiction most closely resembled the creatures with which I was presented. But clearly the average 13-year-old does not have the experience or analytic capability to try to understand vampires on this level. To him, a vampire is simply a blood-sucking monster, though whether such an assumption is fair is the whole point of the book.While I don't know that I would recommend Night Camp to my usual audience, it is definitely the kind of thing that might appeal to the ten-year-old in your life.