Greyson Gray: Camp Legend

       


Review of Greyson Gray: Camp Legend by B. C. Tweedt


Overview from www.barnesandnoble.com: At Morris College All-Sports Camp, Greyson Gray discovers intense athletic competition, quirky huddlemates, and budding romance to distract him from the loneliness he has felt since his father's mysterious disappearance. The lighthearted camp atmosphere turns, though, when Greyson stumbles upon a terrorist's sinister plot brewing in the observatory - a place already haunted by a chilling camp legend. Suddenly, Greyson toils with two dueling worlds - one of lurking danger and mystery, the other of competition and hormones. Spurred on by his father's words to do the good that ought to be done despite the danger, Greyson and his faithful friends must mount a cunning and coordinated heist on the observatory in order to save thousands of lives.

My Review:

Delving back into the world of YA, I have read Greyson Gray: Camp Legend as my book for this week. On first glance it seems strictly to be one of those summer camp/coming of age stories. But this summer camp has a strange twist to it.

Greyson, our twelve-year-old main character, comes to summer camp in Iowa at his mother’s insistence, presumably to help him forget his father’s strange disappearance. Instead he stumbles into a plot to cause havoc in the world and the whole thing is going down in the camp’s observatory.

It all starts when Greyson has an altercation with a fellow camper. The other boy puts his prized hat (given to him by his father before he left) on the cafeteria conveyor belt and Greyson dives for it, ending up in the back room where he overhears some references to the plot though he doesn’t know what it means.

He is then threatened by one of the same workers who insulted him earlier to keep quiet or else. Of course, he doesn’t listen and decides to sneak out at night and find out what is going on and to stop it if he can, convinced by the words of his dad who told him “to do the good that ought to be done.”

Meanwhile he becomes the camp heart throb to the eighth grade girls but he only has eyes for one them, a girl named Sydney who his new friend Jarryd has dubbed as “Deer Girl.” He tries to distance himself from the other girls but they are infatuated and refuse to leave him alone. He will later use their devotion to him as an asset to stop the evil plot of some of the camp workers to cause massive death and destruction.

I liked this one a lot. And I was reading the other reviews on the above website; I discovered that there was a sequel which I am probably going to buy.

The character of Greyson as well as Sydney and his other friends kept me laughing even though the story has a lot of serious elements. For example, I cried when Greyson cried, remembering his last conversation with his father. I laughed at Jarryd’s crazy remarks. And I loved Sydney’s efforts to understand Greyson as well as how she jumped in and tried to save him from himself and the camp plotters who wanted to kill him.

One of my favorite funny lines from Jarryd is as follows: “’Seriously, boys. Are you hiding something?’

“The tension was thick. No boy wanted to break, but if they had already been turned in, breaking would be the best thing to do.

“’Okay, okay.’ Jarryd sighed and looked Brandon straight in the eyes. ‘I am hiding something. I will confess…..I… have a third nipple.’” P.51

Contains: some violence