Be Prepared by Vera Brosgol

Unhappy childhoods make for more interesting books than happy ones: can we agree on that? I've seen several Boomer nostalgia vehicles that were basically "everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds when I was free, white, male, and seven years old," and they're all deadly dull at best.

Unhappiness leads to better stories: writers don't have to suffer, but it definitely gives them better material.

Vera Brosgol has some pretty good material; she off-handedly mentions things both at the beginning (growing up poor among spoiled rich girls in Albany, NY) and the end (moving suddenly to London at the age of ten) of this book that look like they could be full graphic novels of their own. But Be Prepared is the story of one summer at camp...well, a little about the months leading up to that summer, and how she got to that camp, but all focused on ORRA.

Maybe I should back up slightly -- Be Prepared is the story of a girl named Vera, but Brosgol's afterword explains that it's not purely autobiographical. The general outlines are correct, but she went to the ORRA camp for two years, not one, and events have been shaped here to make a better story -- including details from other campers, such as her younger brother. Readers who demand absolute factual accuracy will be crushed; those who like stories about people will be much happier.

I fall into the second camp.

(Hah! "camp". Pun not intended.)

Brosgol is not a new hand at this -- her previous graphic novel Anya's Ghost also drew on her being-an-odd-Russian-kid-in-America childhood, but in a clearly more fictionalized and fantastic way. (The title is not a metaphor.) That was also a damn good graphic novel, just like Be Prepared. Brosgol is creating stories aimed at younger readers -- my guess is upper elementary school, maybe shading into middle, since the rule is that kids hate reading about anyone the slightest bit younger than themselves -- but they're smart, well-told stories that can only come from adult distance, and that makes them just as good for adult readers.

Anyway, young Vera feels like an outsider -- her friends are more affluent and "American" than she is. But there's a summer camp affiliated with her family's Russian Orthodox church, and so she thinks she wants to lean into being Russian -- that will be where she finds girls just like her, and the best friends of her life, right?

Unfortunately, wrong. Young Vera is introverted and a bit quirky -- like all the best people -- and the ORRA camp is cliquish in its own way, with traditions and history and skills she knows nothing about. Plus an outdoor latrine, which is a whole different kind of reality check.

So she's quickly writing letters home begging to be saved from the camp she spent so much time begging to go to. But her mother is busy, so that's not going to happen. Young Vera is just going to have to make it through camp -- find a friend on her own, find things that make her happy, find things she can be good at. She does: it works out.

It turns out this isn't the kind of unhappy childhood caused by outside events -- well, it is, partly, because being poorer than people around you is never a happy thing -- but mostly because young Vera is the kind of person who has trouble being happy. (I know that kind of person well; I'm one, myself.)

And, again, Be Prepared is published specifically for kids, and in particular kids who are their own flavors of weird, unhappy, different, and introverted, but Brosgol is a great storyteller. Her drawings have life and verve to them, with lots of clear emotion in her kid characters, and she structures the story well. I might even give this the highest praise: Be Prepared is a book even for those few bizarre kids who enjoyed camp.