Camp Zero

I recently had the unfortunate experience of reading "Camp Zero" by [Author's Name], and I must say that it was a deeply disappointing journey from start to finish. This book promised an exciting wilderness adventure, but it failed to deliver on every front. Here's why "Camp Zero" left me thoroughly unimpressed:

One-Dimensional Characters: The characters in this book were about as interesting as a blank sheet of paper. They lacked depth, development, and any semblance of relatability. I couldn't connect with or care about any of them, making it nearly impossible to become emotionally invested in the story.

Predictable Plot: From the moment I cracked open this book, it was clear where the plot was headed. There were no surprises, no show more twists, and no moments that made me want to turn the page in anticipation. The story felt like a tired, recycled adventure trope with no fresh perspective to offer.

Lack of Authenticity: "Camp Zero" billed itself as a wilderness adventure, but it felt like the author had never set foot in the great outdoors. The descriptions of the natural surroundings were generic at best and often inaccurate. It was as if the author had done a quick Google search and tried to pass off their limited knowledge as expertise.

Wooden Dialogue: The dialogue in this book was painfully stilted and unrealistic. Characters spoke in clichés and delivered lines that felt forced and contrived. This made it even more challenging to engage with the story, as the interactions between characters were simply not believable.

Underwhelming Climax: If you manage to trudge through the tedious journey to the end of "Camp Zero," you'll be met with a climax that can only be described as anticlimactic. It lacked the tension, excitement, and resolution that a good adventure novel should have. Instead, it left me feeling unsatisfied and wondering why I had bothered to invest my time in the first place.

Shallow Exploration of Themes: The book attempted to delve into themes of survival, friendship, and personal growth, but these themes were treated with such superficiality that they never resonated. It felt like the author was checking boxes rather than genuinely exploring these important ideas.

In conclusion, "Camp Zero" was a forgettable and uninspired read that failed to live up to its promises. I would not recommend wasting your time on this book, as there are countless other wilderness adventure novels out there that offer a more engaging and authentic experience. Save your time and energy for a book that will truly transport you to the great outdoors and capture your imagination. show less

'Camp Zero' provided a depressingly plausible vision of life in 2050 that I'm glad I'm unlikely to live long enough to see.

What made it both plausible and depressing is that this isn't an apocalyptic tale of dramatic destruction but rather a continuation of both the slow erosion by climate change of the way of life that people at the start of the twenty-first century took for granted and the widening of the gap between the choices available to the very wealthy and the choices the rest of us have to cope with.

What made the novel engaging was its focus on three sets of people trying to build lives for themselves in the midst of this slow-motion disintegration and whose paths are all converging on Camp Zero, where Americans have hired show more men to build a new campus in the far north of Canada, next to a long-abandoned small town. One story follows Rose, a sex worker at the camp, who has a secret agenda. One story follows Grant, the son of a leading member of the wealthy elite, who, following a trauma, has fled his family and its wealth to take up a job teaching job at the still-under-construction campus. The third story follows an all-female group of scientists in the American military who have been sent on a long-term mission to White Alice a polar DEW station in Northern Canada left over from the Cold War.

The converging storylines were strongly differentiated from each other in terms of style, perspective and possibly timeline. This made for a richer reading experience both because each storyline captured my imagination and because I kept speculating on how the stories would converge. I found the White Alice storyline to be the most intriguing, partly because the storytelling had the resonance of an oft-repeated oral tradition and partly because I couldn't see where it was going.. The Rose storyline was the most engaging, partly because of Rose's determination to make the most of the opportunities available to her and partly because of the contrast between her experience in the Floating City, a high-tech enclave for the wealthy built off the coast from Boston. I liked Grant's storyline the least, but that's probably a sign of how well-written in was. I found myself being increasingly annoyed by his self-indulgent guilt, his naivety and his refusal to see what was right in front of him.

What kept me turning the pages at first was my desire to know what the women in White Alice did to survive and why Rose was really at Camp Zero and what Camp Zero was really for. As the story continued, I became more interested in Rose as a person and I began to distance myself from the insider's narrative of White Alice and reassess what the women were doing and the group identity that they had built.

I liked the way technology was treated in 'Camp Zero'. The near-future 2050 technologies are described as clearly as in any Science Fiction novel and are all reasonable extrapolations of existing tech. Yet, it's clear that they are a distraction from the problems of the emerging world rather than a solution to them. They enable the rich to extend the lifespan of an unsustainable way of life and they pacify the rest by enabling them to escape into a virtual world that dulls their awareness of the external realities.

One of the main themes in 'Camp Zero' is the difference between male and female agendas. The two dominant males in the story: a tech billionaire and a former climate campaigner turned 'Let's rebuild from the ruins' visionary are driven by ego to reshape the world in their image. They devote their energies to overwriting the current reality with their vision of how the world should work. Rose and the women in White Alice, in their different ways, have understood that the world has changed, that things are bad and that they're not going to get better. They devote their energies to finding a way to survive and to have the best lives they can create for themselves and the people they care about. The men and the women are both ruthless in the pursuit of their agendas. They both practice deception, use violence and seek advantage in any situation.

I liked that 'Camp Zero' never lost its focus on the people in the storylines it followed. It also never devolved into either melodrama or Happy Ever After escapism. The storylines converged and produced a resolution of sorts but, as in real life, each resolution poses new challenges rather than a conclusion.

My favourite lines from 'Camp Zero' come from the last chapter when two women are talking. One says, "But it's a shit world isn't it?" The other replies, "Of course it's shit. But it's the only world we have". That, I think, is an accurate summary of our collective future.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'Camp Zero'. It's told with multiple narrators and it's very well done. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/simonschuster/camp-zero-audiobook-excerpt show less

Camp Zero is Michelle Min Sterling's debut novel. It's a unique, unsettling and addictive read that I just couldn't put down.
It's 2050 and climate change has decimated much of the world. A group of American investors are secretly planning to build far up in the Canadian North. That's the basic premise - but there's so much more.

The cast of characters is very different and gives us varying points of view. The investor, the architect, his foreman, the diggers, the six sex workers that were flown in, an English teacher, the 'locals' and women soldiers living in a nearby Cold War-era climate research station. I thought to myself, how in the world will all these players be tied together? They are though - in a devilishly clever show more plot.

Sterling examines the reasons of each player, what they want, what they need and how they're going to get it. I have to say that I found White Alice's 'whys' and 'hows' were the ones that intrigued me the most.

There's loads of social commentary in Camp Zero. The stakes are high with the rich building enclaves for themselves, staffed by the lower classes. The blithe idea that they are entitled to the land and it's natural resources. Their own comfort and needs trumps all. Even as the planet is dying.

Camp Zero's storyline kept me eagerly turning pages as the action and danger is ramped up on the way to the final pages. The ending was not what I had hoped for - but seems to fit the narrative better.

Camp Zero checked a lot of boxes for this reader - a believable dystopian setting (loved the abandoned mall), interesting characters, a plausible plot and great writing. I look forward to Sterling's next book. show less

Pros: compelling read, interesting personalities

Cons: bittersweet ending

Camp Zero is the beginning of a utopian community in northern Canada, away from the heat and disasters of the rest of the world, where man and nature can finally coexist.

Rose will have enough money to support herself and her mother if she works in the camp’s brothel, spying on its architect for her former boss. Grant took a teaching job there to get away from his ultra rich family and their control over his life. But the diggers have no interest in literature or poetry.

Further north still is White Alice, a station manned by a crew of female Americans who have created their own community.

As life in the camp progresses, it’s clear that this isn’t the escape show more the workers were promised. Are they willing to take the risks required to create the future they want?

I found the book a very compelling read and hard to put down. The characters are vibrant and their situation challenging. It was interesting learning about Rose and Grant’s pasts and how the rich created a new city that could more easily weather the new climate while watching the rest of the US fail. Not as much happens in the present, though seeing Rose try to figure out what she wants in life and take a chance on love was nice.

The White Alice crew was fun, though I was surprised by the extent to which they wanted their community to continue on into the future. Especially given their energy concerns as the production of fossil fuels came to a halt.

There’s limited descriptions of the sex work involved. The profession is treated with dignity by all but one or two of the clients. It’s not a titillating story. Be aware that there is a non-graphic attempted rape later on in the book.

The ending is bittersweet, with a lot left open.

If you’re interested in slow apocalypses and highly personal stories of surviving in challenging circumstances you’ll like this. show less

I think this was a really beautiful story with a feminist and anti-colonialist/anti-capitalist angle that was explored in such a unique way. Beautiful writing, beautiful imagery, and beautiful displays of greed and sisterhood.

However, one of the downsides of multiple POVs is that we all have favorites. I was never emotionally invested in Grant's story. And I also disliked his character, but maybe that was the point? Idk I just despise it when privileged people want to escape to another world to avoid acknowledging they have that privilege, only to realize everywhere else is a dump and they wanna go home to their daddy (but don't, just to prove him wrong). And once we (finally) got his backstory with Jane, I came to my own conclusion show more that he's just a shit guy who refuses to take responsibility for his own ego. He's always being rescued and knows there will always be someone to save him. My problem with this is i'm not sure if that characterization was on purpose. Are we supposed to be rooting for him? Are we meant to be blame his parents solely for Jane's death instead of him? Ya know, the one who refused to go to a secondary location before a bad storm against his girlfriends wishes, only to have his father save him during the thick of it and leave his girlfriend to die? I hope, if there is a sequel (this book surely deserves one), that Grant's ego and privilege is explored in a more realistic way that doesn't sugarcoat his ills.

The Blooms were so cool and I loved what we learn about their connection to White Alice at the end. I honestly didn't expect it. White Alice was definitely interesting, but was too fast paced and skipped so much time. I also struggled to keep timelines with them. I originally thought the book was too populated with them and they were not distinguished well enough from the Blooms. As the book continued, I had an easier time separating them. But in the beginning, there were moments where I genuinely forgot I was reading about one group when it was really the other. I think this is because there were just too many characters. I couldn't keep up. It's incredibly frustrating to be 40% the way in and still not be able to get anyone's names. And that's not to say you can't have a bunch of characters, you just have to make them memorable. For example, Willow was easy for me because her temperament and look was described as wildly different than the others. She was recognizable, not just a name on the page attached to dialogue.

I think the feminist angle was sometimes a bit plainly put, if that makes sense. It was trying to encapsulate the pains of women by very broadly accusing men of everything. Idk how to explain it (and this is coming from someone who, for a long while, basically considered themselves a misandrist). It just felt like the anger was not misDIRECTED, but oversimplified. I think that anger is valid and the environment they're in probably forced them to simplify it, but there are tons of women who engaged in the manipulation and murder going on in this book that were never spoken about. I just think the discussion of men is surface level and runs into territory of just being man-hating? I'm not totally opposed to it, you just run the risk of people not taking you seriously when it's simplified into "all men are murderers and rapists and we will never find peace because of them". Now, this is honestly how I feel all the time!!!!! but there's a more nuanced explanation for it that could've been explored.

Ultimately though, I just got bored in the middle and that made pacing and certain details feel more annoying than they are! Great writing and the premise is super cool but I felt myself waiting for the ball to drop, for something exciting to happen. And it kind of did at the end with the plot twist. But it was so far in that I almost didn't care or notice it. The back and forth POVs just dissipated any momentum the story was working up. This soured the experience a bit but I still think this was awesome and courageous. I imagine it's incredibly difficult to weave these three groups together and it works out great. I hope Sterling is in the process of writing a sequel because she's set it up perfectly for one!! show less

A climate change dystopian in which the rich have built a ‘floating city’ outside of Boston, and are working on another refuge for their fellow rich people in northern Canada, but Camp Zero isn’t all that it seems. Also, there’s a group of women scientists living in isolation at an abandoned Early Distant Warning station even farther north, and they have some plans of their own.

This one was…weird. I enjoyed the parts that highlighted groups of women bonding together to take down the patriarchal norms, but otherwise I think it was a little too scattered. The ending was too abrupt as well.

This near-future climate fiction story has a heavy feminist slant and an underlying mystery. It kept my interest up to the unexpected twist and surprising ending.

While reading, it became apparent that there were several timelines. In one, a Korean American woman brings her mother to the Floating City where she has taken work in the sex trade in exchange for an apartment for her mother. In a world that is burning, the Floating City in its protective shell offers luxury for the wealthy few, the city run by workers who count themselves lucky. She is assigned to an important entrepreneur, instructed she will be an undercover informer.

The entrepreneur then sends her to a far North work site that purposedly is building a college and new town. show more There, she becomes attached to the head of the project, again as an informer. The project in reality is something other than what he believed he was building.

At the same time, the son of a wealthy Floating City family whose despises his family’s values and life style has accepted the position of English teacher at the yet-unbuilt college. He is shocked to find the Diggers still working, excavating holes by hand. Those who work in the North count themselves lucky, too, to escape the burning heat.

The second story line involves a group of female scientists sent to a remote Northern climate station that was preciously run by an all-male crew who disappeared. Over the time, the women realize that supplies are not being sent, that they are an experiment in survival. They are running out of oil and must secure what they need to survive, any way they can.

The novel defies classification: it is climate fiction, a survivor tale, a mystery and undercover spy novel, and incorporates themes of family, gender inequality, and female empowerment.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss. My review is fair and unbiased. show less