Which Part Was the “Miseducation?”: A Review of Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post

8 October 2025

Which Part Was the “Miseducation?”: A Review of Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post

No it’s true: after reading this book, I can more fully respect Danforth’s double-entendre or invitation to inspect the word “Miseducation” in her title. Although it was never my intent to be the focus of this review, it is both interesting and ironic to me now that the only time “miseducation” is mentioned in the story is by Lydia, the pseudo-science pseudo-psychologist at God’s Promise. And when she mentions it, Lydia is talking about Cameron’s habits after her parents’ deaths: self-education via watching endless movies, hanging out with boys and doing boy things, excelling in masculine sports like swimming and track. All the while, God’s Promise’s purpose is to instruct these “disciples” or “sexual deviants” that they are somehow broken and need to be fixed. This is more misguiding than Cam’s self-education. It is a witty title, but I get ahead of myself—or digress—or both.

Danforth’s debut YA novel is a big one. Not only is it a tome, a near epic saga, at 470 pages, but it was published by one of the Big Five: HarperCollins. It’s just that good. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Emily Danforth is precisely my age, born in 1980, and this book was inspired by her personal experience growing up queer in the small town of Miles City, Montana, but that’s about where the similarities between the novel and her life end. In an interview with Jo from Once Upon a Bookcase, Danforth admits that many of the settings in Miles City and many of the adolescent crushes were quite real, but the overarching narrative, including the death of Cam’s parents and her tenure at God’s Promise are fictional.

Post is written in the first person PoV, which is my favorite, as it draws the reader deep into the protagonist’s inner world. The benefit of this is a raw psychological realism that unfurls throughout: as readers, we learn firsthand what it is like to grow up uncertain of one’s sexual preferences and identity, to question our “sinfulness” if we are not straight, to have deeply complex feelings toward our caregivers who say they want the best for us but then do things to harm us (Aunt Ruth and Lydia). I cannot help but believe this story might inform anyone who still thinks being gay is a choice and/or that it can be fixed—all because of the story’s first-person perspective/voice. In fact, this is almost always why I choose this voice for my own writing, as I tend to write characters that are despicable per societal standards: sex addicts, bad moms, narcissists, sufferers of personality disorders like borderline, and etc. My goal, as someone who is more inclined to suspend judgment and hold space for layers of complexity in human nature, is to encourage my readers to witness the justifications of even disgraceful behaviors first-hand through my characters. Not that there was anything despicable about Cameron Post. But maybe that’s my point. What is despicable to one may be reasonable to another. The first-person PoV gives that perspective.

What I enjoyed most about Post’s first-person PoV was Danforth’s grasp of the tenuous, uncertain, and undefined queer teen’s mind. At moments, I was frustrated that Cameron’s character was difficult to pin down, and at first, I blamed Danforth’s writing for this. But as I read further, I realized that Cam had tendencies to hide her true self from Aunt Ruth, Lydia, Rick. Then, there were moments of sincerity with Grandma, Jamie, Adam, and Jane. What bothered me were the moments that Cam’s character was not clear even to Cam—and it took me ‘til the end of the novel to realize that this is realistic. Who among us doesn’t hide parts of ourselves from ourselves? Carl Jung calls this the shadow. And not only would Cam have this because she’s an adolescent, but she would struggle with it even more as she recognizes she’s queer, which seems accepted by nobody around her. This psychological realism is delightful.

In her interview, Danforth talks about how she wanted to do her hometown in eastern Montana justice in her novel, and I think she accomplishes that. One of my favorite aspects of Danforth’s writing is her acute attention to detail. Her descriptions of things like the purple mountains in the distance or the play of sunlight sparkling on snow are not overwrought, and by no means are they grossly romantic or Byronic, but they often trip poetic. Through her words, Danforth paints this magical landscape. If her intent was to draft a “love letter to [her] adolescence there,” as she says in her interview with Jo, she succeeded.

Sadly, when I first picked up this novel, it was just after graduating from my MFA and just prior to moving from Albuquerque, NM to the countryside near Denton, NC. The moments I set aside for reading were sporadic, and never did I have a pen handy to mark the pages; therefore, I have few, if any, specific textual notes.

One theme that struck me anew, although I’ve had many years’ worth of thoughts about the conflict between Christianity and gender/sexual diversity, was the way that Christian faith and scripture can be manipulated and misapplied to make people like Cameron and poor, sweet, perfect, traumatized Mark, believe they are somehow wrong or broken and in need of healing. Obviously, this comes to a head with Mark, who has been taught his whole life to hate himself for who he is—and Cam is right when she points this out to Rick. At God’s Promise, all of them are being taught to despise themselves. How is that Christian? These revelations flow unstoppered out of Cameron as she berates Rick, but we know that this is the book’s overarching message. I rather enjoyed that Danforth gave this to us, the readers, in a sort of verbal diarrhea dialogue instead of some preachy interiority.

The same can be said of every lesson in the book. Danforth handles each indistinctly and delicately, dancing toward the point, touching it with a toe, and then falling away again. Cameron’s final candlelight vigil for her parents was unscripted. It was uncertain, hesitant, and without a clear goal. She didn’t focus on any one issue, necessarily, so much as a few feelings she wanted to share with her parents. And this felt right. No teen understands what’s going on inside their own mind and body. No teen has it all figured out. Thanks to the first person PoV and psychological realism in this moment, Danforth doesn’t need to clobber the reader with a cast iron frying pan of a message: it’s all just—there, folded messily and laid gently before us to take or leave, as we please. Quite right.