“Once I Was a Beehive”
Lane Speer is your typical teenage girl. She loves her family but she doesn’t want to spend every waking moment with them. Most of their vacations are spent camping in the mountains. Even though she complains on the way up, she really enjoys her time in the woods with her mom and dad. She never realized she took them for granted until she loses her father to an unexpected bout with cancer.
Still reeling from her father’s untimely death, Lane finds herself unprepared for the adjustment of life without her dad. To complicate her situation, less than a year after her father’s death, her mother announces that she will be remarried to a guy that Lane hardly knows and even more confusing… he is a Mormon. In her mind, there’s no telling what this means for her relationship with her mother and for her future in general. To top it off, she is told she must stay with her new step-aunt while they are away on their honeymoon.
Things couldn’t get worse until she finds herself with her new anxiety-ridden step-cousin, Phoebe, on her way to a Mormon girls camp she knows almost nothing about. Confronted with memories of camping with her father in the wilderness, she joins a group of leaders and girls, and tries to find her place in the world and make sense of the past year’s events.
At first, she is standoffish and the girls are a bit cliquish, but over time they are able to bond over the increasingly ridiculous situations that this camp trip throws at them. Each of the girls has a chance to show their unique skills and help each other overcome nature, the elements and the harsh realities of growing up as a teenage girl.
In the end, Lane learns to respect and even experience the spirit that is inherent with this group of girls and the Christian values they cherish. Through her friendship with her new cousin and from the leaders of the camp, she also finds a way to deal with the loss of her father and gains hope that she may see him again. Equally important, the group of Mormon girls learn a great deal from Lane’s unique example and perspective. She helps bring the group closer together as young women.
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