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Secret At Camp Nokomis (2000)

by Jacqueline Dembar Greene(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 1

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English

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review 1: I thought it was good and pretty funny.There is a girl named Rebecca Rubin who is the main character and she goes to a camp called Camp Nokomis.There she has an interesting bunkmate named Christina, but the girls call her Tina for short.There is a girl who they call Corky and who bullies people into doing what she wants.In the end, you discover Tina has Polio, but had it last year.She goes to camp because her mom is the cook.
review 2: rebecca is eleven now, it's 1916, & her name was chosen by the children's charity to go to sleepaway camp in the country for one week. her friend rose was supposed to go too, but a boy in her building was diagnosed with polio, & the entire building was quarantined. rebecca & all the other campers from the city have to present the... more town where the camp is located with health certificates identifying them as polio-free. rebecca is really sad that rose can't join her, & she's worried about the polio epidemic in the city--kids get a fever, & the next day, they're paralyzed or dead. but she's excited about camp & she hopes to become fast friends with all the other girls in her tent. she plans to learn how to swim so she can go on a canoe trip, & when she learns that the entire camp will be staging a production of "the song of hiawatha," she decides to try out for narrator.there are two notable characters in rebecca's tent. corky is a bossy irish redhead who comes up with cute nicknames for the other campers, but seems to have a mysterious manipulative streak. she occasionally pulls pranks on the other campers & acts like she knows everything because she'd been at camp the summer before. tina is small for her age & reluctant to change or bathe in front of the other girls. she also occasionally disappears during lessons, & is a target for corky's bullying tendencies. rebecca & tina share a bunk, & rebecca decides to draw out a friendship with tina. but as camp progresses, she begins to realize that she has told tina all about herself, but tina hasn't reciprocated. rebecca wonders how much to trust tina when tina is so secretive & mysterious.all the campers are scared that a monster called the windigo lives in the woods. rebecca's tent goes on a hikinig trip one day without their counselor, & corky tricks the group into splitting up. she leads her own group safely back to camp, where they sit in the crafts tent & have fun, while rebecca's group gets lost, finds a scary cave, & is scared that they have discovered the monster. rebecca is disappointed with corky's tricks.their counselor selects rebecca to be the narrator of the play based on a brief audition, in which rebecca did great & corky did terribly. corky is really jealous & upset, & tells the other campers she'll do their chores if they vote for her to be the narrator instead. rebecca makes a drum to beat while narrating (because much of this book is historically accurate in terms of little white girl appropriating native american culture & traditions to lend a little extra flavor to their camp experiences), but when corky stages her coup, she takes rebecca's drum. even tina doesn't stand up for rebecca, & rebecca cries herself to sleep.corky is also jealous when rebecca receives a letter from home. corky's mother is illiterate & won't be writing any time soon. when rebecca's letter goes missing, she starts to feel like the whole camp is against her.one day, corky organizes an i-spy-style game for the girls in the tent, & uses this as a pretext to open tina's trunk, where she discovers a leg brace. apparently tina had had polio. she's not contagious anymore, & she's at camp to enjoy the food & exercise & build her strength back up. my one complaint is that the foreshadowing on this big reveal was incredibly heavy-handed. as soon as tina was introduced as "small for her age" with "bloomers that were too long," i knew she was a polio survivor. i'm thinking the girls in the tent are a little on the slow side...or they're clueless children. anyway, tina is embarrassed & upset & runs away in the middle of the night because she doesn't think anyone will want to be her friend now. she knows first-hand how terrified people are of the polio epidemic, & no one knows for sure what causes it, so no one wants to buddy up too much to someone who has had it. rebecca realizes tina is gone & she decides to go into the woods after her. corky comes along too. they re-discover the cave where they think the windigo hangs out, & there are weird noises coming from inside it. but it's just their tent counselor, ginny, & the lake instructor, roger, reading poetry to each other (riiiight). rebecca & corky explain that tina has run away, & roger leads them to a house near the woods. inside, they find tina with miss pepper, the camp cook. it turns out that miss pepper is actually mrs. pfeffer, & she's tina's mom. mrs. pfeffer took the camp cook job on the condition that tina could become a camper to help with her recovery from polio. the camp director broke a lot of rules to allow tina to be a camper, but he thinks he made the right choice for tina's health.corky acknowledges that rebecca would be a better narrator for the end-of-week performance & returns the drum. everyone makes up & the girls in rebecca's tent learn that it's not okay to shun someone just because they have a non-communicable debilitating disease (i guess?). on the last day of camp, the girls get the news that due to low camp enrollment due to polio quarantines in the city, everyone gets to stay an extra week! yay! so rebecca & her tentmates have an extra week to be friends now that all the drama & bullshit are behind them. & yes, corky stole rebecca's letter because she was jealous. she returns it & rebecca forgives her. the boy in rose's building recovers from his bout with polio, & no one else in rose's building contracts it. happy endings. less

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