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 surfaceβfamily illness or the unwanted advances of one of Mack's colleaguesβthey 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 weddingβthe beginning of
her life as a Navy wifeβto 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 honeymoonβto the
crisis that almost tears her family apart.
From the love that began, almost by chance, all those years
agoβ¦
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