Book 682: Camp Cutlery – Robin Carnilius

If you’re a fan of McTucky Fried High, Carnilius’ hilariously poignant YouTube series about anthropomorphized food surviving high school, you’ll definitely appreciate this one. (If you’re not familiar with McTucky, I included the teaser for Season 1 below.) When they reached out with a review copy of the book, I recognized the name and my response was “definitely!” to reviewing this one.*

Camp Cutlery: A Hunger for Justice picks up not long after the McTucky Fried High series ends and it follows Peanut, a transgender social justice warrior, through their journey at a correctional facility. The biggest challenge by far of reading a work that is a continuation of another work is the pre-set expectations and frankly, no author, can do anything about those. This being said, this story definitely works on most levels, but for me a good portion of the charm was lost from the animated series.

This says more about me, than it does this work which stands on its own merit. I think for me the timing and delivery of the lines in the animated series really made it worth watching, whereas this due to its nature is a flatter less malleable delivery method.

Where Carnilius really excels, both in this and in McTucky Fried High, is at is writing characters with inter-sectional identities and they have leaned into that by choosing to continue Peanut’s story over the other characters in their work. Where it didn’t quite work out so much for me was from a pacing perspective.

Having to build an entirely new world, the youth correctional facility, within their existing world took a good portion of the plot line. This both disrupted and halted the story lines forward momentum and ultimately it felt a little slower than I was hoping the book would be and didn’t provide a satisfactory ending, but did provide a great cliff hanger.

Recommendation: Overall, Camp Cutlery is a great read and is heading in a direction that I think will be really interesting to see Carnilius conquer through their unique sense of illustration and humor, but for me I like where it’s going more than where it currently is.

*I received a copy of Camp Cutlery: A Hunger for Justice from the author in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.