Camp Fire Girls' Careers

The girls are all grown up now, and the summer they spent in the woods feels like another life. Twelve friends who once gathered around a campfire as girls now face a harder question: what does a woman do with her future? Some will marry. Some will choose careers that would have been unthinkable a generation before. And at the center of it all stands Polly O'Neill, the brilliant and erratic one, the girl who never did anything by half measures. Margaret Vandercook follows these women into the complicated years between girlhood and adulthood, where every choice carries weight and no path is easy. This is the fifth volume in the Camp Fire Girls series, but it stands on its own as a story about what happens when the adventures end and real life begins. For readers who grew up with these characters, it's a reunion with old friends facing unfamiliar challenges. For new readers, it's a window into an era when women were just beginning to imagine lives beyond the home, and doing so required a kind of courage that looked a lot like defiance.