Mom Camp
Véronique Darwin$23.95
A debut collection of interconnected fiction that delivers a frothy, philosophical take on modern female archetypes.
In elementary school math, she was given a worksheet with six connected squares in the shape of a T, so she drew one girl in each box. When Jeanne was told to cut around the shape, and fold and tape the squares into one cube, she couldn’t decide whether to keep the girls outside, looking away from each other, or trapped inside, looking in. Her solution was to rip it up and eat the pieces. The six characters have lived inside her ever since.
An unnamed woman retreats to sort herself into the various roles she has played (Sister, Friend, Server, Lover); another woman, Jeanne, checks into a hotel-turned-escape room empty-handed. These parallel narratives lead a parade of interconnected stories and a novella featuring women of all ages who feel divided between their various roles and their past and present selves. With warmth and humour, the stories in Mom Camp reposition selfhood as rooted in relationship and explore the phenomenology of consciousness—and what it means to be the narrator of your own life.
“Attentive to the writing life as both vocation and burden, Mom Camp traces reading and writing under pressure—false 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 Darwin’s 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 Darwin’s Mom Camp is a generous exploration of womanhood in its many forms. Its stories—about everything from deep platonic friendships to the intricacies of parenting with a partner—are 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 Darwin’s 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 Camp’s dynamic cast of female leads bubbles over with funny, earnest questions about what it means to live each day in search of one’s truest self. Part fantasy dollhouse, part summer camp romp, part expansive blackbox theatre experiment—Darwin 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 gather—at camp, at a monastery retreat, in an art class—to 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
| Author | Véronique Darwin |
|---|---|
| Publication date | May 5, 2026 |
| Print details | 9781998336319 / Paperback / 5.5 x 8.5 / 276 pages |
| Ebook details | 9781998336326 / DRM-free epub / Conforms to WCAG 2.0 Level AA |
| Rights | World |
| Colophon | Cover art licensed via plainpicture/Pupa Neumann Printed in Canada by Imprimerie Gauvin (Gatineau, Quebec) using Sustana EnviroBook™ 100% recycled uncoated paper and cover stock milled near Montreal, Quebec. Using one ton of Sustana EnviroBook™ rather than a virgin paper saves the equivalent of 24 trees, 1,773 gallons of water, and 3,399 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions. |
Read an excerpt from Mom Camp by Véronique Darwin
Mom Camp
the women blindfolded each other. They manipulated their bodies into child-sized superhero costumes. They spun and pinned the Velcro bottle closest to the nipple of the mom next to them. “Turn left if a diaper ever exploded in your face!” Curiously, many of the moms staggered right, bouncing off each other in their shiny spandex. Reluctant to view their lives as jokes, mothers preferred to make themselves the objects of ridicule.
Unable to watch any longer, Amélie went for a walk with her phone. Along a muddy path by the lake, she booked a quick trip home to see her mom and sister. Later, after a nap on her bunk bed’s plastic mattress, she confirmed shipping on a few Etsy sales, and over tea in the cafeteria, she completed her required time on the breathing app she’d been assigned as part of her return-to-work plan.
Back in the domed meeting room that held a few dozen moms, Amélie could admit she felt a little clearer of mind. The other women were doing partner yoga—something her team of burnout doctors would recommend—but she was here for one reason: to sell her crafts at the Mommy Market. If she were to gain anything from this weekend away, she figured it would be sleep.
As the group moved toward dinner by way of a station offering complimentary watery cocktails, Amélie triaged the women. Some wore bright leggings and cross-trainers. They were at Mom Camp to achieve something. Others wore stylish sweatpants or kimonos. They were eager to let themselves go. Amélie looked for the women in hoodied crop tops and animal ears, the ones who would skip dinner to go straight into the lake. These women were here to party and were therefore the most likely to have drugs on them. Amélie wore blue medical scrubs. Dental hygienist, some might think, and that was fine; nurse, others would think, and she didn’t mind that either. The scrubs were her colour. They were comfortable, and they were the only way she felt like she could gesture at her identity now.
Amélie had become a surgeon because she was good with her hands, but she was only good with her hands because of an adolescence spent crafting miniatures, a very particular hobby that garnered her some Canadian media attention—especially her time-lapse diorama of Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, honouring her identity as a transplant from France. Practically minded, Amélie couldn’t see a real future as an artisan, so she’d set her sights on the human body: It required the same care for detail she had applied to inanimate objects. However, when she returned to surgery after her son, Didier, was born, Amélie found she could not look at a body with the same precision. She had spent nine months growing a boy from a cell—he was now a whole, not its pieces. She’d returned to crafting to train herself back up.
After dinner and a few glasses of boxed wine in the dining hall, Amélie reluctantly accepted her placement into a group of three for a sunset activity on the lawn. Phaedra, a blond woman in her thirties who wore a sports bra and sweatpants, re-explained the activity that had just been explained. She spoke with an air of competence that came from having attended Mom Camp since its first living room iteration a decade ago. Candice, a woman in her fifties with a pompadour hairstyle, pulled on a pair of clown pants from the tickle trunk next to the stage; they had no choice now but to pivot to her idea for their mom band. Though Amélie hated following a leader, she’d listened to her husband’s pleas that she be a better team player and delegate every once in a while. Surgeons were, above all, required to know their role.
“I’ll do a poster board,” said Amélie, and she set about creating a satirical advertisement for Candice the Clown, a children’s entertainer Candice claimed was her shadow self.
(…)