Oblong Books & Music

Please join us for a reading and signing with Rebecca Chace, author of Leaving Rock Harbor.

This event will be held at our Rhinebeck store.

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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.

Rebecca Chace is the author of the novel Leaving Rock Harbor and the memoir, Chautauqua Summer (1993) which was a New York Times “Notable Book," as well as “Editor's Choice" and "Picks for Summer" in the New York Times Book Review. She is also the author of the novel Capture the Flag (1999). Her essay in Fiction Magazine, “Looking for Robinson Crusoe," was recently nominated for a Pushcart prize.  She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in First Year Seminar at Bard College and a part-time faculty member of the City College of New York, in the MFA Creative Writing Program, where she teaches Fiction and Dramatic Writing.

Advance Praise for Leaving Rock Harbor:

"An irresistible read in part because its protagonist, Frankie Ross, seduces us on the first page and never surrenders our affection, but also because fictional Rock Harbor feels as real as she does.

-- Richard Russo, author of That Old Cape Magic and Empire Falls 

"Chace has deftly and seamlessly interwoven a love story, an elegy for a vanished way of life, and an account of a crucial and neglected period in America's social history. Nobody who reads this moving, evocative and sure-handed novel will ever forget Frankie and her world."

-- David Gates, author of Jernigan

Leaving Rock Harbor (Hardcover)

By Rebecca Chace

$25.00

ISBN-13: 9781439141304
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Scribner, 06/01/2010

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