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If you’re looking for some campy drama to brighten up your summer vacation reading, check out I’ll Never Tell by Catherine McKenzie. You can pre-order it for just $4.99.  It releases in June 2019.

Camp was the highlight of my summers for my entire childhood.  I started going to the short sleepovers when I was about 7 years old.  My cousin always went the same week, so I had a friend there.  Now, this was a Christian church camp so our antics were pretty tame.  I do remember serenading the boys’ dorm on a couple of midnight occasions, and of course there were the crushes that seemed so devastating by the end of the week.  When I was in high school and college, I stayed for most of the summer as a counselor.  It was very different to see the camp from that perspective.  Those memories are so dear to me.  It broke my heart that my own kids don’t want to go to camp!

In the book I’ll Never Tell, the camp story is told from the family’s point of view.  Their family’s livelihood depended on the camp and its “lifers,” so it wasn’t just a source of recreation.  It was their lifestyle.  The timelines switch off between the decades-ago night of a terrible tragedy, and a weekend in the present.  The tale is a mystery to solve, but also documents the unraveling of a family.

I’ve never counted how many narrators are too much for me, but 7 tipped the canoe.  The constant back-and-forth was dizzying.  In the swing of the pendulum, though, the characters became more real to me.  Their flaws and humanity stood out.  I started to care about them.  While I thought the ending would be cut and dry, it surprised me.  I’d like to go back and read it again to see what I missed.

At first, it seemed like this would be appropriate as a teen fiction novel, but somewhere around the middle of the book a lot of adult action started happening.  This is easily a family drama, maybe a psychological suspense, but not a thriller.  If you’re like me, there’s no checking behind your shoulder with this book.  After all, the danger is probably inside your house already.