Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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If you are looking for an inviting group of gals to spend a few winter evenings with, pull up your afghan (you knitted it yourself, right?) and snuggle in with The Friday Night Knitting Club.
Kate Jacobs' breezy first novel reads like Steel Magnolias set in Manhattan. Julia Roberts is already set to star in the movie version of this story about a single mother named Georgia Walker, abandoned by her hunky urban professional beau, James, and left to raise their daughter, Dakota, alone. To survive, she opens a knitting shop that attracts a circle of women who tenuously become friends in the knitting club.
Club makes you yearn for yarn, even if you're not a knitter, with descriptions of colors and textures that make you want to grab some No. 8 needles and start purling.
Not all the club members knit, at least not with yarn (if such metaphors are going to upset you, put your needles and this book down immediately). But these babes are going to get through anything -- widowhood, single mothering, unemployment, divorce and illness -- by using the lessons of knitting as a pattern for life.
It's a clever premise, the book is a breezy read, and the characters are mostly well drawn and appealing. Favorites are the widowed seventysomething Anita, who is afraid to accept a new love; and charm-challenged Darwin, who seeks her doctorate in women's studies by interrogating the knitters, whom she considers real throwbacks.
Are there surprises here? Not really. Is the ending telegraphed? Yes. Was I snagged nonetheless? You bet your crochet hook I was.
A quibble: Jacobs has a way with developing characters you instantly know and want to spend time with. So why does she, like other novelists of books aimed at women I've read of late, feel the need for a wink-wink mention of a real movie star (Roberts) in the book? I know, it's obvious: the better to hook said star into making the movie.
And Roberts already has signed to star as Georgia. Just call the movie Knitty Woman.
The Friday Night Knitting Club
By Kate Jacobs
Putnam, 352 pp., $22.95
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