Leaving Rock Harbor A Novel (Hardcover)

From the Publisher: An unforgettable coming-of-age story and a luminous portrayal of a dramatic era of American history, Rebecca Chace's Leaving Rock Harbor takes readers into the heart of a New England mill town in the early twentieth century.||On the eve of World War I, fourteen-year-old Frankie Ross and her parents leave their simple life in Poughkeepsie to seek a new beginning in the booming city of Rock Harbor, Massachusetts. Frankie's father finds work in a bustling cotton mill, but erupting labor strikes threaten to dismantle the town's socioeconomic structure. Frankie soon befriends two charismatic young men--Winslow Curtis, privileged son of the town's most powerful politician, and Joe Barros, a Portuguese mill worker who becomes a union organizer--forming a tender yet bittersweet love triangle that will have an impact on all three throughout their lives.||Inspired in part by Chace's family history, Frankie's journey to adulthood takes us through the First World War and into the Jazz Age, followed by the Great Depression--from rags to riches and back again. Her life parallels the evolution of the mill town itself, and the lost promise of a boomtown that everyone thought would last forever.||Of her acclaimed novel Capture the Flag, the Los Angeles Times said, "Chace's writing resembles a generation of New York writers heavily influenced by John Updike: Rick Moody, A. M. Homes, Susan Minot, and, more recently, Melissa Bank." With its lyrical prose and compelling style, Leaving Rock Harbor further establishes Chace's position in that literary tradition.