The miseducation of Cameron Post

I wanted to like this book more than I did. From the opening pages, I was hooked, and I enjoyed Danforth's talented use of voice. Cameron sounds like a real child/teen with a real personality and real problems (unlike some books where the main character just sounds like the author pretending to be a child/teen). Danforth establishes her character very quickly and very skillfully (actually, all of the characters are very well done), and she really nails the setting.

The reason I didn't stay hooked is because the pacing is way off. It takes a long time for anything to happen (in fact, going to the gay conversion therapy school doesn't happen until halfway-to-3/4 way through the book), and the story drags and drags between all the important events (and even the important events tend to drag). I was also disappointed that some of the characters I thought were important drop off the page and never make a satisfactory reappearance, and then other characters that have very little relevance to the story are given more page time than seems necessary. The story didn't have the kind of closure I wanted, either.

This book covers a lot of ground. Is it a story of a girl coming to terms with her sexuality? Is it a story of one girl's relationship with another? Is it the story of life at a gay conversion therapy school? Is it the story of a girl grieving for her dead parents? Is it a story of religious intolerance? Is it a story of the political climate regarding gay rights, and its effect on home life, in the early nineties? It's all of these things, which is both good and bad. This novel is certainly worthy of covering all these deep topics, and handles them all with aplomb, but the more I read, the more frustrated I got with the story constantly shifting. I felt some aspects never get the right amount of closure (especially with Coley). Coupled with the length of the book and those long dragging parts, it left my interest waning.