Chiggers

Edition excerpt from Chiggers (2008): It's summertime, and 13-year-old Abby is at camp. It promises to be a great time - she's planning to spend a lot of time with her friend Rose, who is now a cabin assistant, and she'll be bunking with Beth, a girl she met the summer before. But Rose turns out to be too busy with her new cabin assistant duties to spend any time hanging out with Abby. And Beth seems to have developed a persona that's almost too cool for Abby to get. Then Shasta arrives on the scene. She's pretty, she's fun, and she enjoys exactly the same books and games Abby does. Unfortunately she also rubs Beth and Zoe, Abby's other cabinmate, the wrong way. What happens next will be familiar to any girl who's ever been torn between friendships. This is a classic summer camp story of the friendships and betrayals among girls that epitomizes what it's like to be female, nerdy, and adolescent in America.