1) "The Friday Night Knitting Club" by Kate Jacobs
A Steel Magnolias for the 21st-century set in a New York City knitting shop.
Debut novelist Jacobs capitalizes on last year’s hot knitting trend with this laughs-and-tears women’s novel. Georgia Walker, a single mother in her gorgeous late 30s, runs a specialty knitting shop in midtown Manhattan. Every Friday, a quirky group of women gathers at the shop for food, gossip and tips. The novel follows the threads of their criss-crossing lives—more or less. Its true focus is Georgia’s romance, past and possibly present, with Dakota’s father James, a handsome, charming, successful black architect who has reappeared on the scene after a 12-year absence. (Jacobs touches on race—Georgia is white—but it serves as little more than an exotic grace note in an otherwise standard romance plot.) The novel’s most successful stretch takes place in Scotland, far away from the knitting shop and the club, when Georgia visits her wisdom-dispensing grandmother with her 12-year-old daughter Dakota and her spoiled, ex-socialite best friend in tow. Jacobs seems all too aware of her book’s niche market potential. Readers are encouraged to visit a website devoted to the book for knitting tips and patterns.
The female cast is likeable, but Jacobs pushes hard the idea of knitting as a metaphor for life, which thickens the novel’s syrupy Lifetime Channel melodrama until it congeals into a bizarre ending.
2) "The Knitting Circle" by Ann Hood
The popular Rhode Island author’s eighth novel (Ruby, 1998, etc.) is another domestic melodrama about loss, grief, therapeutic bonding and communal healing.
The title denotes the group of female friends hesitantly joined by Providence matron Mary Baxter, following the sudden death of her five-year-old daughter Stella. Gradually forming acquaintances (if not quite friendships) with the women she encounters at “Big Alice’s” Sit and Knit, Mary sleepwalks through her days, grasping the tenuous connection that binds her to husband Dylan, edging back toward her part-time job as cultural reporter for a local weekly alternative newspaper. This somewhat static narrative pattern is punctuated by terse phone conversations with her mother Mamie, an alcoholic who has always kept Mary at a distance (and who inexplicably failed to attend her granddaughter’s funeral). Then we hear the knitters’ personal stories in a sort of Oprah-moderated Decameron. Red-haired beauty Scarlet became involved with a married Parisian, but their affair fell victim to her carelessness. Tough-talking “glass artist” Lulu survived a violent rape. Ellen has a teenaged daughter with a failing heart—and, furthermore, left the close Appalachian community where she grew up to abscond with the charming Irishman who proved unworthy of her love. Embittered Harriet lost loved ones on 9/11, “perfect” supermom Beth suffers from cancer. And so on, through the bad days when Dylan leaves depressive Mary for another woman, until a restorative Christmas season filled with reconciliations, good cheer, completed knitting projects and all that good stuff. The impulse behind this novel is respectable (an author’s note discloses that it’s based on Hood’s own very similar experience of loss). But its overload of clichés, redundancy and exceedingly predictable sentimentality fails its good intentions.
Readers can only knit their brows in consternation, and hope for a better book next time.
3) "Knitting" by Anne Bartlett
An Australian first-timer connects two women’s lives through the ancient art of knitting, in a brief, sweetly winning tale.
Since her husband’s death a year earlier, textile historian Sandra Fildes feels as if she’s wearing a layer of elastic glass “holding her in and keeping everybody else out.” She needs a new project, and when the loopy knitter Martha McKenzie suddenly comes into her life—they’re the only two who help a collapsed man in the street—she lights on Martha to fulfill her academic dreams. Martha has quit her drudgery as an exploited knitter for a famous sweater designer and instead finds work cleaning the church, all the while knitting patterns dear to her simply because she loves to knit. Martha is poor and cheerful and generous, while Sandra lives in a big stone house with a pool; Martha befriends the recovered collapsed man, Cliff, while Sandra thinks he’s seedy and a thief. But Sandra is amazed by Martha’s gift at knitting and sees her as a direct line to the ancient traditions of inventive women’s work, and even plans to stage an exhibition called “Texturality,” a social history of the century featuring historically patterned garments knitted by the one and only Martha. Martha, however, is a perfectionist and becomes psychologically unstable when pressured—like now, as Sandra becomes increasingly manipulative and controlling of her friend. Indeed, Sandra even recognizes that she treated her dead husband in much the same way she’s treating poor Martha. The story of the friendship between these two very different personalities is affecting, the snob Sandra continually foiled in her attempts to categorize Martha, who “[keeps] turning into something else” and who is indeed the more sympathetic character, with her otherness and “careless propensity for joy.” At the same time, though, Bartlett’s weaving in of women’s inventive traditions is rather heavy and academic.
Still, a spirited feminist take sure to find favor with women’s book groups.
4) "Death by Cashmere" by Sally Goldenbaum
A quartet of knitters probes the death of a restless young researcher on Cape Cod.
Childhood sweetheart Tony Framingham predicted that Izzy Chambers would become “a female Atticus Finch.” But his crystal ball didn’t foresee that they’d both come back to Sea Harbor, Tony to help his widowed mother Margarethe with the family business and disillusioned corporate lawyer Izzy as proprietor of Seaside Knitting Studio. Although her aunt, Nell Endicott, frets about Izzy’s upstairs tenant, former wild child Angelina Archer, Izzy assures her that Angie has a respectable job planning an exhibit for the Sea Harbor Historical Museum; that she is dating reliable Pete Halloran; and that she even spends time listening to dotty old Angus McPherron talk about the old days. So when Angie’s drugged and pushed off the breakwater, Izzy and Nell meet fellow yarn buffs—80-something Birdie Favazza and Pete’s lobsterwoman sister Cass—over Nell’s soup and Birdie’s wine to dispute the prevailing wisdom that the malefactor must have been a passing stranger. And since the creepy town watchman, George Gideon, is certainly no protection, the four stout needlewomen agree that it’s up to them to root out the menace that threatens tranquil Sea Harbor.
Even the genuine charms of its characters can’t save Goldenbaum’s series debut from its glacial pace and obvious ending. Her indecision about whether to make Izzy or Nell the headliner further tangles this cozy skein.
5) "The Quilter's Apprentice" by Jennifer Chiaverini
6) "Knit One, Pearl One" by Gail McNeil
Third in a bland series about a British knit-shop owner.
McNeil’s dubious strategy appears to be this: Take an inherently tame subject and make it even tamer. Having relocated from London to the sleepy seaside town of Broadgate Bay, Jo Mackenzie has finally achieved equilibrium after presumably more exciting upheavals in previous books (Divas Don’t Knit, 2007, etc.). Her globe-trotting, philandering reporter husband Nick, father of Jo’s two sons, announced he wanted a divorce shortly before he was killed in a car crash. While visiting her singularly unsupportive parents in Venice, Jo had a consolatory fling with Daniel, a top fashion photographer, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy. Worse, she discovered she’s penniless since Nick mortgaged the family home. Now, Pearl, the unplanned baby, is going through her princess toddler phase and sons Archie and Jack are misbehaving in ways American parents could only dream of. For such a dull drudge, Jo has some interesting friends: Grace, a student in Jo’s knitting class, also happens to be a movie star (Broadgate’s answer to Julia Roberts?), and Ellen is host of a weekly TV interview program. In the romance department, carpenter and computer guru Martin, he of the lovable but untrainable hound Trevor, puts Jo to sleep on their first date. Will this be a regular occurrence, Jo’s friends speculate endlessly? Only time will tell. (The soporific effect on readers, however, will be immediate.) Halfway through, crisis looms when Jo’s parents come to visit, imposing themselves on Jo’s grandmother and threatening to disrupt a big event: Grace has agreed to be Ellen’s first guest at an episode to be filmed at Jo’s knit shop. Slowed by bloated and repetitious dialogue, child-rearing minutia (no detail spared about family routines, meals, school activities, etc.), lame attempts at cuteness and an almost complete absence of conflict, the story fizzles long before a major complication can salvage it.
May appeal to a niche readership with a high tolerance for tedium.
7) "Knit Two" by Kate Jacobs
More-of-the-same sequel to The Friday Night Knitting Club (2007).
A predictable array of personal issues and preoccupations once again dominate the pages as Jacobs returns to the scene of her bestselling debut. Manhattan’s Walker & Daughter yarn shop provides the central setting for a group of women to knit and empathize; only its original proprietor, Georgia, is missing, having died from cancer in the first novel. Georgia’s biracial daughter Dakota is now 18, a student at New York University who is experiencing her first interest in a man. Peri, who took over the yarn business, worries that Dakota wants to supplant her (she doesn’t). Peri’s best friend KC has a high-powered job, but feels perimenopausal and anxious. Surrogate grandmother to Dakota, 78-year-old widow Anita, is finally marrying her lover. Georgia’s best friend Catherine feels the need for a family rather than more lovers. Lucie and Darwin are preoccupied with their mothering skills. Dilemmas concerning work, love, siblings, parenting and children are parceled out in various combinations to each character in an efficient but uninventive narrative that opens with a welter of links and recaps, continues minus any central focus and ends with most problems neatly solved.
Devotees of the formulaic original will likely enjoy this update, but new readers may balk at the banal observations, easy resolutions and group hugs.
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