A Review of Michelle Min Sterling’s Camp Zero (Atria, 2023)

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Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Corinna Cape

*reviewer’s note: In my aim to cover as much ground and texts as I can, I’m focusing on shorter lightning reviews that get to the gist of my reading experience! As Asian American literature has boomed, my time to read this exponentially growing archive has only diminished. I will do my best, as always!

Michelle Min Sterling’s Camp Zero (Atria, 2023) is one of those books I took a chance on to bring with me on an airplane flight. I tend to pick books I think will be incredibly immersive, something to take me away from the cramped seating! Sterling’s debut did not disappoint. Let’s let the official marketing description give us some information: “In remote northern Canada, a team led by a visionary American architect is breaking ground on a building project called Camp Zero, intended to be the beginning of a new way of life. A clever and determined young woman code-named Rose is offered a chance to join the Blooms, a group hired to entertain the men in camp—but her real mission is to secretly monitor the mercurial architect in charge. In return, she’ll receive a home for her climate-displaced Korean immigrant mother and herself. Rose quickly secures the trust of her target, only to discover that everyone has a hidden agenda, and nothing is as it seems. Through skillfully braided perspectives, including those of a young professor longing to escape his wealthy family and an all-woman military research unit struggling for survival at a climate station, the fate of Camp Zero’s inhabitants reaches a stunning crescendo. Atmospheric, fiercely original, and utterly gripping, Camp Zero is an electrifying page-turner and a masterful exploration of who and what will survive in a warming world, and how falling in love and building community can be the most daring acts of all.”

This novel had an intricate plot and interspersed narrative perspectives. One of the more disappointing characters was none other than an elite-turned-English teacher who realizes that his idealistic desires to teach art in a remote location turn out at best to be misguided and potentially deadly at worst. A side plot involving a group of female scientists turns out to be an important narrative thread, which comes together in satisfying fashion by the novel’s conclusion. Of course, the emotional center of the text is none other than Rose, who we see is spurred into the titular camp with the hope that she can help her mother out. Rose has one form of capital that she’s been using to help get her through a science fictional dystopian future: her beauty, which she wields to get her access to better jobs as well as better resources for herself and her mother. Perhaps the most intriguing element of this text is that it places way more tension at the US-Canadian border due to climate change. As the weather patterns shift, more and more of Canada becomes habitable, while parts of the United States become flooded. In this respect, Sterling’s work treads the well-worn cautionary tale of dystopian narratives in which the science fictional future seems not far off from our lived reality.

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