Review: The War Bride's Scrapbook

The downside to being management and no longer doing day-to-day selection at The Day Job is that a lot of books fly under my radar now.  God bless Dorine, who mentioned this book on her blog a while back.  In 2011, Caroline Preston wrote another scrapbook/novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt - which I simply adored.  Now, seven long years later, she's following up with another, The War Bride's Scrapbook.

As the title suggests, this is a story of a young woman who meets a soldier a mere 3 weeks before he deploys overseas.  When he leaves?  They're married.  Lila is a Virginia (Charlottesville) girl who has never been lucky in love.  Her plump figure and working/middle class parents haven't done her a ton of favors, although her mother has always had ambitions for her two girls to marry college boys.  Lila actually has some brains though, and wants to study architecture, an avenue not open to her since no school in the South is going to admit a mere female into such a program.  So she settles for doing claims adjustments at the insurance company where her father works, and selling war bonds post-Pearl Harbor.

She first met Perry Weld when she showed up to do a claim adjustment.  He was nice to her and she was smitten by his New England good looks.  But the encounter is over before it can begin, and Lila admits that her girlish crush could never be anything more.  I mean, the guy is totally out of her league.  However, their paths cross again after Pearl Harbor, when Perry answers an ad Lila placed for a roommate.  He's looking for temporary lodgings before he ships out and Lila, well she didn't specify what gender a potential roommate should be.  Before you know it a whirlwind courtship ensues and the two are married just before Perry ships out for England with his combat engineering unit.

I still read print, but tend to gravitate towards digital roughly 90% of the time because of convenience and my terrible eyesight.  However, this is a book ideal for the print format.  It's entirely told in scrapbook form, sort of like a picture book for adults.  There's photos, drawings, news clippings, and letters written by both Perry and Lila (heads up fans of epistolary stories!).

For that reason, it's a bit much for readers to expect dynamite character development.  I did get a good feel for both Perry and Lila by the end of this story, but the format doesn't lend itself to a heavy deep-dive into exploring the psychology of the characters.  The secondary players add colorful bits (Lordy, especially Perry's parents!) and the scrapbook moving between the battlefields and the homefront makes for a nice juxtaposition of wartime experiences.

However, where this book ultimately stumbled for me was with the ending.  Look, I'm well aware this isn't, technically, a romance novel.  And Americans - we have this tendency to romanticize World War II.  So part of this is definitely on me - but dammit Janet, this has a bittersweet ending.  I'm going to spoil it and say, yes - Perry comes home alive.  But both he and Lila have been changed by their experiences and I'm left with the feeling that their marriage is....well, "challenging."  I mean, look - all marriages are challenging.  Things aren't great all the time.  But the author has to go, burst my bubble, and tell me things get challenging post-war and....

I go from the heady glow of lovers reunited to a bucket of cold ice water dumped over my head.  The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, technically, wasn't a romance either - but, as I recall, it had an ending that left me with a hopeful feeling.  This ending?  Just left me depressed and a little sad.

I enjoyed this while I was reading it, it's a really cool concept and the content is dynamite.  But dammit Janet, me no likey the way it ends.  Now I'm off to read a romance novel.  Because, dammit.

Final Grade = C-

The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt

When I tell people what I do for a living they immediately think I sit in an office all day and read books.  Uh, no.  What I do is read a mother-lode of book reviews.  Then once I do that, I go to places where your average non-librarian citizen hears about books.  Let's face it - they aren't pouring over Publisher's Weekly every week.  They just aren't.  They're watching the Today Show, reading People magazine, and trolling around on Entertainment Weekly's web site.  That's how they hear about books - and that's how I heard about The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt - by reading Oprah's (::shudder::) magazine.

Once I tweeted (yeah, I did) the publisher to confirm that Caroline Preston's scrapbook-style novel didn't have any dreaded pull out ephemera (no little letters tucked in envelopes for example), I happily forked over library funds to buy several copies.  Because, you know, our customers read Oprah.  It generated a modest waiting list, and when I noticed a copy sitting on the New Books shelves before I left work for the holiday weekend, I thought "What the heck?"  Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the book I zipped through in a couple of hours on Christmas Eve.

The best way I can describe this novel is that it's a picture book for grown-ups.  Or better yet, like going to a cocktail party and poking around in your host's medicine cabinet.  We meet Frances "Frankie" Pratt when she graduates high school in 1920.  She's a young lady with big dreams stuck in a tiny New England town.  Over the course of reading her scrapbook, we follow her from Connecticut, to Vassar, to New York City, to Paris, back to Connecticut.  It's a bit like uncovering an old photo album while playing in Grandma's attic and discovering the old lady had a really cool life before shackling herself to Grandpa.

It is a charming little book, with a wonderful "hook" and a nice attention to historical detail.  It also makes me weep bitter, copious tears that this era tends to be flat-out ignored in romance genre circles (yeah, yeah World War I and the Great Depression are major downers, but it's such an interesting time for women!).  That being said, readers shouldn't go into this book expecting serious amounts of depth.  It's a story told in scrapbook form, so we're not talking oodles of text here.  We also really only get Frankie's point of view, so if you're a reader not wild about first-person?  This one isn't likely to change your mind.

But it is an enjoyable little read that has a lot to recommend it to the right person.  I can totally see scrapbooking crafty-types going ga-ga over this.  Also, if you're a bit of a social history nut, like I am, this is a real treasure trove.  I suspect some romance readers will find Frankie's romantic entanglements less than fulfilling, but I found them remarkably refreshing in a "true to life" sort of way.  There are boys, then men, and all of this leads to Frankie being the woman she is by the final chapter.

Like I said, it's a bit like finding out that Grandma was pretty kick ass before she settled down, had babies, and baked cookies for the grandkids.  It is what it is - that is to say somewhat of a novelty.  But it's a charming, breathtaking novelty that I didn't want to put down.

Final Grade = B+