Book Spotlight: “The Yearbook” by Carol Masciola

The Yearbook
by Carol Masciola
Publisher: Merit Press
Release Date: October 2015

Genre: Historical Fiction, Time Travel, Young Adult, Romance, Contemporary

Synopsis:

Misfit teen Lola Lundy has every right to her anger and her misery. She’s failing in school, living in a group home, and social workers keep watching her like hawks, waiting for her to show signs of the horrible mental illness that cost Lola’s mother her life. Then, one night, she falls asleep in a storage room in her high school library, where she’s seen an old yearbook—from the days when the place was an upscale academy for young scholars instead of a dump. When Lola wakes, it’s to a scene that is nothing short of impossible.

Lola quickly determines that she’s gone back to the past—eighty years in the past, to be exact. The Fall Frolic dance is going full blast in the gym, and there she makes an instant connection with the brainy and provocative Peter Hemmings, class of ’24. His face is familiar, because she’s seen his senior portrait in the yearbook. By night’s end, Lola thinks she sees hope for her disastrous present: She’ll make a new future for herself in the past. But is it real? Or has the major mental illness in Lola’s family background finally claimed her? Has she slipped through a crack in time, or into a romantic hallucination she created in her own mind, wishing on the ragged pages of a yearbook from a more graceful time long ago?

Carol Masciola got the idea for her novel The Yearbook (Merit Press, Nov. 2015), after inheriting a 1924 yearbook that had belonged to her grandmother. She is a former newspaper reporter and winner of the PEN/West Literary Award in journalism. Two of her screenplays, THE FIERY DEPTHS and THE UGLY STICK, are in development.