"Attentive to the writing life as both vocation and burden, Mom Camp traces reading and writing under pressurefalse starts, subtle recalibrations, and moments of personal growth that unfold quietly across social life, family bonds, friendships, marriage, and sex. 'I read a book by a woman who knows something will happen to her one day, and look: it does. She says she let herself happen.' In this debut, Véronique Darwin asks what it means to narrate a life, what it costs to hold competing selves at once, and how writing itself takes shape through the slow, intimate work of becoming. A debut of patience and emotional precision."Sheung-King, author of Batshit Seven
Step inside the world of Mom Camp, a place both startlingly familiar and uncannily strange. Véronique Darwins debut is confident and perceptive about the lives women lead, or perhaps imagine they do. This is a charming, inventive, and funny collection that explores the infinite complexities of motherhood, sisterhood, and female identity.Alix Ohlin, author of We Want What We Want
"Véronique Darwins Mom Camp is a generous exploration of womanhood in its many forms. Its storiesabout everything from deep platonic friendships to the intricacies of parenting with a partnerare deeply strange, well observed, and often laugh-out-loud funny. A remarkable debut from a writer to watch."Gabrielle Drolet, author of Look Ma, No Hands
"Véronique Darwins kaleidoscopic debut collection of stories shimmers with tenderness and comic grace. With clear-eyed precision and a taste for the absurd dressed up in plain clothes, Mom Camps dynamic cast of female leads bubble over with funny, earnest questions about what it means to live each day in search of ones truest self. Part fantasy dollhouse, part summer camp romp, part expansive blackbox theatre experimentDarwin has created here something deeply courageous and loving. These stories are wiser than they know."Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, author of The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
"With playfulness and sparkling wit, Mom Camp stages investigations into identity and intimacy. In these stories, women gatherat camp, at a monastery retreat, in an art classto parse who they are and where they belong. These are fictions of containment and eruption, where labels miss the mark, narratives grow holes, and forms are made to be broken. In this confident debut, Véronique Darwin locates magic in the messy particulars of existence; Mom Camp is a work of keen perception and vitality."Marisa Grizenko, author of the Plain Pleasures newsletter
