THE ENCAMPMENT is about two worlds colliding: the pristine world of an upper-crust, private girl’s high school and the world of a recently-returned soldier suffering from PTSD. The question is, will two girls break the rules of the private high school to save a man’s life?

Sylvia and Elizabeth, two seniors, the first the daughter of the headmistress, go into town one weekend to get ice cream not because they’re hungry but because they have nothing better to do. After 12 years of privileged education, having completed each task set before her, Sylvia wonders, “Is this all there is?” Begging for money outside the ice cream parlor is a middle-aged, bedraggled man. So begins a chance encounter that will change all of their lives.

At first, Sylvia and Elizabeth treat the ex-Marine-sergeant, Christopher, as a privileged person does a stray dog—the girls give him scraps: a few dollar bills. But over time, the girls start to wonder about him. How can a man who has served four tours in Iraq live in poverty on the grounds of a school that charges tens of thousands of dollars to attend each year? Should the privileged bear some responsibility? Then, when Sylvia is out for one of her marathon runs, she stumbles upon Christopher naked, bathing in the river. She is dumbstruck, thrilled, and scared. In his nakedness, he becomes more of a person to her. In the same vicinity, she discovers his encampment: a lean-to he’s constructed out of tightly-knit pine boughs on the school’s property. If she tells anyone, especially her mom, the police would chase Christopher off. Instead, Sylvia and Elizabeth take a secret, deeper role in Christopher’s life by bringing him canned food and a grill. Then, as the brutal, Connecticut winter approaches, the girls decide to steal warm clothes and camping supplies from the school—an act that would get them expelled. And when careless boys destroy Christopher’s encampment and unwittingly sentence him to death by cold, Sylvia has to decide whether to up the ante and risk everything she’s worked for for the past 12 years, or let a man die. Can this high-priced school for privileged girls abandon what it considers “correct” to reinvent itself as a school that does what is conscionable?

Davenport does a great job bringing both worlds to life, really, two encampments because the school is its own little, secluded world, with its own set of rules and values. We wonder, as Davenport writes in one remarkable line, whether the school will live by the rules that express what it was, or grow the rules to express what it wants to be. In this collision of worlds, when the smallness of the world Sylvia has lived in becomes apparent to her, she gets the answer to her question, “Is this all there is?”

There is beautiful writing throughout. Davenport has a way of writing characters that express unconventional thoughts in the most compelling ways. The risk the girls put themselves in carries the dramatic tension through the novel. Davenport, an ex-teacher and headmaster himself, also sneaks in what it looks like to be a great teacher.

The characters are fully fleshed out. Sylvia is our way into the novel because she, like us, the readers, have no deep understanding of what it is to live with PTSD. Davenport writes beautifully about PTSD and we learn along with Sylvia the sentence that PTSD exacts on people as we see Christopher struggle.

The world that we, the reader live in is like our own encampment with its sense of normality and rules. The novel is asking if we, like Sylvia, the privileged, would be brave enough to welcome these complicated individuals into our encampment or would we knock down their lean-to’s and run like the teenage boys? “Is this all there is,” is a question Davenport poses for the reader. What makes life worth living? Staying comfortable in our small, cocooned, privileged life, or living in a bigger world, seeing the humanity in all of us, and making a difference?
This is the third book of a trilogy but it very much stands on its own. It’s a treat. Read it.

Steve Davenport is a consummate educator. As a former teacher, advisor, coach, administrator, parent, and national spokesperson for liberal learning, Davenport knows the WHAT and the HOW of the school world from the inside.

However, in THE ENCAMPMENT, the third book in the SAVING MISS OLIVER’S trilogy, Davenport turns to the WHY of education. Two Grade 12 women are finding their voices for college and future life. When they meet a war-wounded homeless man, will they be empowered to think about social issues, or will they also take action? This question informs THE ENCAMPMENT in powerful and surprising ways.

If one likes school novels such as GOOD-BYE MR. CHIPS, THE RECTOR OF JUSTIN, or A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, then THE ENCAMPMENT is a “must read.”