It was the worst vacation…EVER! Genevieve could not believe that her mother (a former Little House on the Prairie addict) would think that spending the summer at Camp Frontier would actually be fun. Every summer Gen had gone to soccer camp, but this year her family was venturing out into the Wyoming wilderness to pretend to live like 1890s pioneers. There was no swimming, no shopping, no electricity, and no Internet! No one brushes their teeth. No one wears deodorant. Genevieve is forced to give up her Gap jeans and wear a long wool dress that makes her look like Strawberry Shortcake. The only way Gen can keep her sanity is to stash a cell phone in her Clearasil box so that she could secretly text her BFFs Kristin and Ashley about the horrors of living off the land instead of the fridge. Her friends use her text messages to start a blog that chronicles her hilarious stories about life on the frontier.
Week 1 – Monday
11:41 am
ARE there really bears out here? My dad said if you’re all by yourself you should sing to keep them away.
Week 1 – Monday
11:42 am
But the way I sing, a bear might attack me just to make me stop.
To make matters worse, all of the families are supposed to compete against each other, like a nightmare Survivor reality show. Genevieve’s family, struggling to cook on a wood stove and clean clothes on an old-fashioned washboard, is soon ranked lowest in the camp. The worst thing is that Nora, the know-it-all daughter of the family that runs the camp, treats Gen like a loser. The only bright spot of the entire vacation is a cute guy named Caleb who flirts with Gen, which annoys Nora to no end.
Just when Gen starts to get the hang of frontier life – she learns how to churn butter and milk a cantankerous cow named Jezebel – the blog her friends started goes viral (over 500 thousand hits!). The blog catches the attention of a local TV news reporter, who shows up a Camp Frontier to get the scoop. If Gen thought peeing in an outhouse was a problem, things were about to get a whole lot worse!
Plenty of humor, action, and romance make Little Blog on the Prairie a fun read for teen girls. For more YA humor, I recommend Models Don’t Eat Chocolate Cookies by Erin Dionne and Bollywood Babes by Narinder Dhami (see links below) .