Rosebriars and ink

Last night I watched The Miseduation of Cameron Post, a film about an 11^th grader whose aunt sends her away to a Christian conversion camp after she gets caught hooking up with a female friend. The film is set in 1993.

It’s a heartfelt film about Cameron’s resistance to being changed and her developing identity (Asked early on at camp when she started to think of herself as a homosexual, Cameron asserts “I don’t think of myself as a homosexual. I don’t think of myself as anything, really.”), but it doesn’t differ meaningfully from other conversion camp films I’ve seen. Boy Erased made me cry and this one didn’t, if that’s worth anything.

The film swings between the current moment, and flashbacks to Cameron’s relationship with Coley, the friend with whom she was caught, in ways that both show us the line of Cameron’s thoughts and also become somewhat confusing. It was unclear to me for much of the film what actually happened that resulted in Cameron getting caught. Both that experience and the letter Coley sends Cameron later make it seem like that was their first hook-up, but the flashback sections suggest they had been together several times before, which makes it unclear of those are actual memories or just Cameron’s fantasies of what could have happened (further complicated by a couple of actual dream sequences). It was not helped by the actors frequently dropping into whispers and mumbling; I missed entire exchanges because I couldn’t hear.

Either of Cameron’s two buddies at camp—Jane, a Black girl who grew up on a free love commune but whose mother recently married a conservative man whose decision it was to send Jane away (and who has been at this camp for over a year); or Adam, a Lakota two-spirit whose father recently got into politics, converted to Christianity, and demanded his child follow suit—would have made for more interesting protagonists. Cameron comes off pretty nondescript, which is exacerbated by how internalized she is, rarely speaking or expressing herself. It’s not until the end of the film where she really starts saying anything.

One thing The Miseducation of Cameron Post does do differently is that the staff at the camp lack the total, violent conviction of other conversion camp narratives I’ve seen. Some staff have that attitude, but others visibly doubt if they’re doing the right thing, particularly after some exchanges with the campers (and I maintain there’s a scene at the end where one staff member chooses to be passive in a way that helps Cameron and her pals, when he could have done otherwise). This adds an interesting tension, where it’s not just the campers asking themselves if what’s going on here is right or wrong.

The ending is pretty open in a way that’s not totally satisfying (one of those “Okay…but what now?” kind of endings) but it is a sweet final moment and it’s so easy to root for Cam and her friends, even though we just got a reminder of how little the rest of society cares about what’s happening to the kids in these camps.

This film is based off the book of the same name by Emily M. Danforth, which I haven’t read. Turns out it’s a bit of a chunker, at 500 pages, and reviews say Cameron doesn’t go to camp until halfway through, with the first 250 pages just backstory on her relationship with Coley. The film cuts out almost all of this to focus on the conversation camp narrative, which I think is the right choice, because it’s where the real story is.

On the whole, I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t stand out to me in any way.

Yesterday on a lovely walk through then neighborhood I reached the end of The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso. This is fantasy/action novel, set in a world in “prime” reality, beneath which sits ever-descending “echo” layers of reality. The further down you go, the stranger and more dangerous things get. At a New Year’s party, things get unexpectedly tricky when the entire party is pulled down through the echoes.

Our protagonist is Kembral Thorne, a “hound” whose job is to retrieve people, animals, and other things that are pulled or “fall” into the echoes. This party is Kem’s first step back into society after having her first baby two months earlier.

Of course, when things start going wrong, Kem can’t help but get involved. It’s her job.

I’ll say again, I do love queer lit with adults. YA is great and I’m so happy that teens today have access to so much queer lit, but online queer book recs can skew very YA. Here, Kem is very much someone at least in her thirties—she’s got a baby, she’s reached a senior role in her career, and her concerns reflect this position in her life. While she and her quasi-rival Rika have the sort of skittish interactions you might expect from people who are into each other and unwilling to admit they are into each other, they don’t reach the level of comic avoidance or overwrought drama of teens or young adults.

I liked the ebb and flow of Kem and Rika’s relationship. These are two people who already have history and have kind of already had their big, relationship-ending squabble before we even get to this party, which is fun to unravel over the course of the evening. They have some cute moments, some artificially-amplified angst, but are generally enjoyable.

The worldbuilding here is fine. It’s serviceable for what the novel is doing, but we don’t really get a look at much else outside of the party except when Kem ventures out into the echoes, which becomes increasingly less frequent as they descend. There’s some fun stuff, some spooky stuff, some aesthetic stuff.

The book pushes a little hard on maintaining the status quo when the status quo isn’t that great (I think it could have made this more believable with more discussion, but the book is really more about the action than the political debate) and I did think one character’s fate was a cop-out, especially given the former. Violent change to the system is wrong but we’ll all shrug and smile when this criminal we couldn’t nail down conveniently dies without a trial.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one, but it’s nothing earth-shattering. I put the next book on my TBR though because I do want to see what Rika and Kem get up to next.