The Order of the Poison Oak, Brent Hartinger

Find this book in the Hawley Library

I'm just gonna have to come out and say it up front: this is one of those situations where the sequel is not as good as the original. I liked Geography Club a whole lot better. Anyways, in this installment, Russel decides he wants a break from being jeered at and everything in his hometown for being gay, so he decides to go with a couple of his friends from Geography Club to work at a summer camp where he is not going to be out. This would have been an interesting thing to explore - what is it like to be out and then not, and how does that feel? I guess Russell didn't really want to be out in his hometown, he was more outed, but getting back to this book -

so Russell is a camp counselor, and the first couple weeks the camp is for burn victims. So there's a lot of heavy handed metaphors about what people look like on the outside vs. their hidden identities and so on. Russell gets played big time, but eventually finds a decent relationship before the summer's over. It's not a bad book overall, there are some fun moments, and since it's so short it's not really a big waste of time or anything. I guess I was just dissapointed that it was just ok.