Avoidance

An affecting book. A Harvard Divinity School student writing his dissertation on the Amish practice of shunning recalls his years as a summer camper after his father died and, especially, later, as an assistant director at the same camp during a year when he has a special relationship with one of the campers. It's a meditation on the meaning of especially intense communities set apart from the world, on friendship, & on the costs of inappropriate expressions of love. It's written in a way that makes you eager to keep reading to see what will happen next, only with an excess of writerly similes.

Jeremy becomes infatuated with Max, a 14-year-old at summer camp. When Max confides in him that he has been molested by the camp director, Jeremy realises just how close he came to actually committing the same crime.