The Clover Girls by Viola Shipman

Elizabeth, Veronica, Rachel and Emily met at Camp Birchwood as girls in 1985, where over four summers they were the Clover Girls—inseparable for those magical few weeks of freedom—until the last summer that pulled them apart. Now approaching middle age, the women are facing challenges they never imagined as teens, struggles with their marriages, their children, their careers, and wondering who it is they see when they look in the mirror.

Then Liz, V and Rachel each receive a letter from Emily with devastating news. She implores the girls who were once her best friends to reunite at Camp Birchwood one last time, to spend a week together revisiting the dreams they’d put aside and repair the relationships they’d allowed to sour. But the women are not the same idealistic, confident girls who once ruled Camp Birchwood, and perhaps some friendships aren’t meant to last forever…

There was some good to the book, but some bad, too. The good, was that it was an interesting concept; four women, friends as girls, then three brought together as adults by the death of the fourth.

But that’s where the bad comes in. I kept thinking that the voices of the women were off, that women didn’t speak in poetic phrases (read, sappy,) or become so maudlin. Or come across as a travelogue for Michigan. I live in Michigan, and it started to get to be a bit much for me!

And their reasons for doing things were always because of the way they felt as women, as if they weren’t unique in any way, just all a product of how women can be treated. As if that was the only lens they could see through. Or that none of them had done any growing, even though they were well into middle age. It was only when I was reading the acknowledgment that I thought to take a look at the picture of the author. Surprise, surprise, it’s a man.

Not that men can’t write women well, or the reverse. It’s just that this particular man doesn’t write women very well. not here, anyway.




MADE IT TO THE TOP OF MOUNT ARARAT!!!!

( TBR Book Links 1-45 )

46. Harvest Home by Tom Tryon
47. The Cider House Rules by John Irving
48. The Clover Girls by Viola Shipman






COMPLETED LJ SUMMER BINGO! Read a book set at summer camp - The Clover Girls by Viola Shipman