I appreciated capturing the essence of summer camp utopian feelings. That’s a rare theme in literature. ( )

Interesting but I'm a little burnt out on books about kids in love with summer camp. ( )

This may not be the book for me to review. It takes place in Delta County Colorado where I grew up. the zip code for Escadom is that of Paonia, the town where I grew up. I was so tied up in trying to make sense of geography, I lost the storyline about a man who bought property for a summer camp for rich kids and the anger of the rancher’s son from whom he’d bought the property. ( )

ummm... okay. so, my feelings about this novel seem to be running counter to the majority. while i appreciated abel's writing, the story just didn't work for me. i found the characters didn't develop well enough, and there was a depth to it all that felt lacking. i am drawn to stories about communal living, and cults. generally, with these types of novels, levels of emotion and charisma of the characters run higher, are palpable. i just didn't feel any of these traits coming through the story. i can read a novel of this length in a couple of days. it took me 12 days to get through this one, and i really felt it dragging. i had hoped to like this story so much more than i did - the premise appealed to me so strongly. sorry!! ( )

Idealism vs reality collide in this thoughtful novel, set in the 1970s - 1990s, amongst conflicted back-to-the-landers and radical journalists. The main characters are "red diaper" babies, the children of Movement parents. Caleb yearns to be a cowboy and establishes Llamalo, a survivalist summer camp in the high mesas of Colorado. His young cousin, Berkeley freshman Rachel, is sent to the camp when her parents, publishers of revolutionary newspaper Our Side Now, make a momentous decision. She joins David, a year younger, who dreams of staying at Llamalo forever. Escadom, the former boomtown nearest to the camp, abandoned by Exxon when the company determined that shale drilling would be too expensive (foreshadowing the later fracking boom), is home to Don and his son Donnie, who reluctantly sold their ranch to Caleb when their income collapsed.

All of these characters make for a very pungent stew of class conflict. Caleb, idolized by the campers and despised by Donnie, chooses a new female counselor as consort each summer, an entitlement that really stings in this #METOO era. Rebecca and David, on the other hand, glide into a lovely sexual initiation that is so perfectly drawn, from both perspectives, that's the best I've ever read.

There's a lot going on here, and no one gets out very happy (except the reader). I hope that author Abel can continue this story in a second novel with the growing and changing of these memorable characters in the new millennium and beyond.

Quote: "The promise of pleasure was itself so pleasurable that he almost wanted to prolong this expectancy." ( )