Critical Essay | Critical Review by Richard Eder

Critical Review by Richard Eder

SOURCE: “A Summer of Transformations,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 4, 1994, pp. 3, 5.

In the following review, Eder asserts that the strength of Phillips's prose in Shelter practically transforms the reader into a preadolescent in the West Virginia woods.

“The forest is all around us and we're like a country inside it,” Alma Swenson writes home from her Girl Guides summer in the West Virginia mountains [in Shelter]. Her older sister, Lenny, tells herself: “Nothing from home belonged here; home would take it all away.”

Camp Shelter is, among other things, a camp. It has ramshackle wooden cabins and canvas tents, morning river-fogs and stupefying noonday heat, mosquitoes and no-see-ums, campfires, hikes, swimming in a muddy pond, lectures from the director about the Communist threat and the importance of table conversation, and reassuringly glutinous meals. It is a place of homesickness and emancipation from home; of...
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