A Book Review Starring "The Miseducation of Cameron Post" by Emily Danforth

The Short Version:
Set in the late 1980s and early 1990s in rural Montana, Cameron Post grows up with the weight of thinking her attraction to her best friend made her responsible for her parents' death. When beautiful Coley Taylor joins her church group and school, Cameron finds herself falling in love with her new friend and must deal with the consequences of being outed as a result.

The Long Version:
Given the evocative sense of detail, the specificity of time and place (and that it was set in a period that looks to align with when the author would have been that age) you may get the sense this is a thinly disguised narrative that may resemble autobiography. Not that it's a bad thing. The highly evocative feel actually gives the story and characters a depth and richness that involves you in the story.

Danforth does a great job of providing complexity and detail to her characters, even the secondary characters who might otherwise have come off as one dimensional or just plain awful, are given a nice sense of humanity. But it's her main character Cameron Post who carries the story, particularly through the dense, wordy parts that can make the read a bit slow.

And there are a lot of words in those 470 pages. While it's great that Danforth has a wealth of knowledge and detail from which to draw, I'm not sure it needed to be this long and, at times, this dense. It's one of those books that you sometimes ask yourself where was the editor.

The book can be split into two parts, the romance and it's aftermath. If I were a teenage lesbian, or recommending the book to a teenage lesbian, I'd want her to stop right before the first part ends, when the book is chock full of emotional and sexual tension that I'd crave at that age and find in satisfying doses here. The second half of the book, the aftermath lets call it, is a harder read. It may ring true (particularly for certain populations or areas of the country), it may even be semi-autobiographical, but it's not as much fun or as interesting as the first half.