Reading THE SCRAPBOOK is like riding a gentle ocean wave.
It lifts you, hugs you, carries you, and ever so softly
sets you back down. Gentle, rolling, comforting. The
reader comes away feeling as though having experienced
something special.
In this romantic saga, Lynnette Kent tells the story of
Celia and Mack Butler, a career military family. Just as
Mack graduates from the US Naval Academy, Celia discovers
that she's pregnant. They marry and begin their journey
on a lifetime of long. Along the way there are
separations due to Mack's career, more children, and many
relocations. Even when external threats to their love
surface—family illness or the unwanted advances of one of
Mack's colleagues—they manage to navigate the murky waters
and survive to come out stronger.
THE SCRAPBOOK is an endearing story of love from the
1980's through the present. Mack's love for Celia is
never in doubt, although Celia is sometimes unsure and
Mack doesn't always do the best job of showing Celia his
feelings. Celia, like many wives, puts her entire being
into being the best wife and mother that she knows how. I
kept wanting Celia to reach a little deeper to uncover her
own hopes and dreams, even if she never chose to pursue
them, but Celia's choices struck me as extremely realistic
and believable, as did Mack's.
Anyone looking at the photographs in Celia's scrapbook
would see a portrait of a wonderful marriage, from Celia
and Mack Butler's beautiful white wedding—the beginning of
her life as a Navy wife—to her growing, smiling family.
But Celia's life is not so easily summed up in photographs.
The value of these moments frozen in time is the stories
behind them. From the sweetness of a child's birth, or the
excitement surrounding a much-belated honeymoon—to the
crisis that almost tears her family apart.
From the love that began, almost by chance, all those years
ago…