The Scrapbook

by: Peggy B. Baker

Published by: Llumina Press

Reviewed by Maria Elmvang

Natasha and Emma have been best friends ever since their mothers were roommates on the maternity ward. They were playmates as kids, best friends all the way through school, and though life has taken them in very different directions, are still as inseparable as when they were first born.

Emma is happily married, a stay-at-home mom to three wonderful kids, and an avid scrapbooker. Natasha, on the other hand, moves from relationship to relationship, travels all over the world due to her job as a lawyer, doesn’t think she has a creative bone in her body, and is perfectly content just being “Auntie Tashi” to Emma’s children.

Life seems just about perfect for them both, but early foreshadowing shows the reader that all is not as it ought to be for the two friends.

The Scrapbook is a charming book about love and friendship that’ll strike a chord with any female reader, even one who isn’t interested in scrapbooking herself (that’d be me). The writing style makes it read like a series of blog entries, which allows the reader to feel like she really knows the characters and has been granted a special insight into their lives. This way of writing a novel, as well as the fact that the happenings in the book are all very realistic, made me occasionally doubt whether the book was fictional or not, which just added to the feeling of knowing the characters as more than ”˜just’ people in a book.

Like many other chick lits, The Scrapbook doesn’t quite escape being predictable at times–something that was made even more apparent because of the heavy use of foreshadowing–but Peggy Baker still managed to surprise me often enough that it didn’t become tedious. I might have guessed the ending early, but not how they got there. She would have benefitted from fewer references to the move “Casablanca” though. Fortunately I’d seen the movie, but readers who haven’t might be thrown for a loop by the numerous mentions of it.

Peggy Baker herself is an eager scrapbooker, which shows in the book, and she realistically describes the scrapbooking community existing online. Even the book’s layout is inspired by scrapbooking, with each chapter heading being made in a different style.

Armchair Interviews says: A delightful read.