Looking for the Klondike Stone

I go back and reread this book every summer. The main surprise is that the author recalls her camp days as the happiest of her youth, and goes to lengths to avoid coming home or having her parents visit. Though she begins at a young age, she isn't homesick - and her descriptions of the camp make it clear why. The camp offers the more traditional activities, along with theater, and Indian lore, and Arthur takes us intimately through the camp's counselors, activities and physical layout. We're right beside her as she describes skinny dipping, taking a hayride, searching for the Klondike Stone (a camp legend), and we feel acutely the bittersweetness of the end-of-camp banquet which has given her "a permanent phobia about people being nice to me." There is little cattiness or competition with her fellow campers, and though her days could hardly have been as unbrokenly idyllic as described here, we do believe, with her, that being a camper there "made her one of the blessed."