A Fan's Playground

I just have so many warm and fuzzy feelings about this book. Friendship between girls! Summer camp, including canoe tripping! Adults in a children's book who are actually good people! People being supportive of each other despite different backgrounds and life experiences!

The only unfortunate part is having to read past the appropriative stereotypes of Native Americans - at least it is mostly centred on half of one chapter so it's fairly easily skippable.

It's particularly interesting to me, though, that the book contains those stereotypes given that some googling of the author reveals (see: Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States) that she wrote some relatively radical works for her era? Like a picture book about friendship between a black boy and a white boy - apparently considered the very first interracial picture book! And a book about a young woman with ambitions that extend beyond just marriage and family! A reminder yet again that someone who is progressive in some areas can still be problematic in others.

I requested this book for one of my early yuletides but gave up on requesting it the very next year - it is SUCH a low likelihood that anyone else participating in Yuletide is familiar with this book, given it's a long-out-of-print children's book that isn't in the public domain. But it's sad, because I really would love to read fic for this book. Especially more about Beth after the end of the book!

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(on another note, I was always vaguely surprised by the idea of a summer camp that you go to for the entirety of your summer vacation from school, as opposed to it just being a one-to-two-week experience. In the book the months-long camp is presented as a matter of course, as if that's the only way for summer camp to be. Do such camps still exist, or are they a product of a bygone era?)