The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit; Or, over the Top with the Winnebagos

It's 1917, and the Winnebago Camp Fire Girls are restless. While the boys march off to war, Sahwah the Sunfish and her friends find themselves stuck at home, stifled by skirts and social expectations that tell them to wait, worry, and look pretty. When they head to Oakwood for the summer with their Guardian Nyoda, they expect boredom. What they find is purpose, adventure, and a mystery involving a lieutenant who can't stop dreaming about a girl's laughter on a train. This is early twentieth-century girls'-adventure fiction at its most spirited: frothy, patriotic, and surprisingly sharp about the iron cage of gender roles. The girls argue fiercely about what they could be doing, what they're allowed to do, and whether traditional femininity is a costume or a prison. There's romance in the margins, but the real love story is between friends who refuse to be small. A window into how young women imagined themselves during the Great War, when the world cracked open and some climbed through.