Sleepaway Girls was okay. The main character, Sam, is your typical can't-say-no type. She does whatever her best friend wants, but in a burst of independence, she decides to be a CIT at a camp for the summer instead of being third wheel to BFF and BFF's BF.
Sam has never done the camp thing before, but she seems to adjust mostly quickly. Although she harbors a ridiculous fear of wolves for the entire book.
She gets off on the wrong foot with the camp princess, who just so happens to be the owner's younger daughter. His older daughter is more like the camp queen, but she's nice.
So the book has Sam struggling with doing too many things for others, liking the hot boy who turns out to be a player and then realizing she's liked the nice (and also hot) boy who's been good to her all along, making friends, making enemies, and dealing with some insane drama.
The war between Sam and Ashley (the bratty princess) culminates in a food fight in the mess hall. The two are taken to the camp office where they're bitched at, but the staff keeps mentioning that they knew about this rivalry...and didn't do a fucking thing about it. The things Ashley does are very hurtful and she never gets any sort of proper comeuppance. You get the reasons why she did what she did, but she shows no remorse or even realization that she was a horrible, abusive bully.
The secondary cast was more enjoyable than the main and her rival. There's the boy crazy black girl who's secretly very artistic, the romance novel-obsessed more shy girl that finally gets herself some actual romance, and the sporty, driven, total Type A girl. Their characters are fun, but also could have been fleshed out a lot better than they were.
I wouldn't recommend this. Calonita's written better books. (Like the Belles trilogy, which I need to finish.) But it's a fun little romp that's a quick read and it did the trick.
Next up, I'm going back to the mid-90s for one of those BSC-inspired girl series: Adventurers Inc. Not that it's about babysitting, but it's a series of thin volumes with an ensemble cast of teen girls.
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