Rating
3.72 of 5 Votes: 5
The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Clubby Gil McNeilWe meet Jo MacKenzie when she is moving out of her London home. Her life changed forever with the death of her husband. The only problem is, her life would have changed anyway, because he was leaving her for the woman he was having an affair with. He told her upon his return from a business trip, promptly left her and unfortunately died in a car accident on the way to meet his lover.Jo can no longer afford to continue her life in London, and doesn’t really want to. Her grandmother offers her a lifeline. She has a small cottage in a tiny village by the sea that Jo and her two small sons Archie and Jack can move into. Gran is also ready to retire and hand over the family knit shop to Jo, so the small family travels to an entirely new life.Adjusting to a new home and job is difficult enough, but Jo has to contend with the ghost of her cheating husband, keeping him alive in the boy’s memories, all the while unable to express her anger and pain he caused her before his untimely demise. For years she had been covering his inadequacies as a husband and father and it appears she will have to do so the rest of her life.Don’t mistake the overall theme of the story as sadness, that is far from the reality of the plot. Jo enjoys her quieter life away from London. Her friend, a television news personality, frequently comes to visit, bringing her own kind of crazy caring chaos that only a best friend can creates.A domineering mother, grandma, sons and newfound friends round out her new life. Her children are delightfully ordinary. Bickering and teasing each other, getting into typical little boy trouble and begging for a dog.Throughout all of the changes in her life, the knit shop becomes her constant source of satisfaction and growth. She makes subtle and not so subtle changes to the shop and inventory, forms a “Stitch and Bitch” group and becomes a private consultant-on-call to a famous resident of the village.This thoroughly engrossing novel was a delight to read. Then characters have varied, interesting lives and goals, which work together in this small village. Readers can genuinely connect with them because most of them are ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, just making their way through their world. It is heartwarming to watch their growth and adaptation to the challenges they face, not always winning, but carrying on anyway.You may think that you would have to know about or be interested in knitting to enjoy this book. I don’t believe you have to know a thing about it, there aren’t any technical issues that would prevent your enjoyment even if you have never picked up a pair of needles or a ball of wool.I loved this book. My thanks go out to my daughter-in-law Andrea for giving it to me last Christmas. McNeil has written several books, including a newly published novel A Good Year for the Roses. I’m adding it to my wish list for next Christmas.Published by Poisoned Pen PressISBN-10:1-4013-4080-6404 pagesGenre: FictionCopyright © 2014 Laura Hartman I can't honestly say I would recommend this book to anyone. It seems to be another of quite the list of "chick lit" books aimed at the knitting resurgence that came about from around 2003 or so that seems to have tapered off again in more recent years. The way I see it, books like this were just trying to catch the eye of the knitting crowd (I am a knitter, so they did a good job in that sense, apparently, as I have tried 3 of these kinds of books already), but the trouble with these books is that you could take out the knitting part and add something else, such as a book club or wine tasting circle, and it would amount to the same thing.Aside from trying to cash in on the knitting trend, this particular book seems to have tried to cash in on the trend of writing in first person present tense. I find this style of writing very, very off putting. It does not feel more real or intense, and it doesn't feel like it's "happening right now", as I have seen it described before. It's distracting and I feel even MORE disconnected from the story as a result. In fact, it's so distracting and irritating that my brain even tried putting it into first person PAST tense basically the entire time I was reading it. There are another couple quirks of this author's style that really grind me, too. There are semi-random strings of words held together by hyphens and spots where there are incorrectly capitalized words. Both these style quirks always catch my attention too much and distract me from the story.Several others have brought this up, but I thought I would as well. There is FAR too much swearing going on. It's really unnecessary. Having a character blurt out a curse once in a while is one thing, if they've gotten into a particularly rough spot or have done something to hurt themselves, but this is far too constant and just annoying. The story itself was good enough that it managed to keep my attention for 400 pages, although it is a fast read, so that helped, too. It only took be about 3 days to read it. I sort of liked some of the characters, but there was nothing very unique about them. I've seen them all before, just with different names and in someone else's knitting club book, if you follow me. The main character is likeable enough, but she's too fantastic. She already had someone semi-famous as her best friend to begin with, but then she manages to become close with a movie star and a famous photographer as well? That really bothered me because it's so far fetched. There really wasn't much of a plot to this story, either. It's one of those "slice of life" type novels that never has much for conflict anywhere along the way, and then just sort of ends (though I do know this is a series, and no, I will not be reading any further books by this author). No conflict, no climax. It just comes to a point where the narrative ends and we're done. How unsatisfying...I do have to say that I enjoyed how completely British it is. Having all that British slang and culture going on kept my interest more than anything else. I quite liked that bit!I'm not sorry I read it, but this is definitely not going to have a long stay in my book collection, I'm not interested in a continuation of this story, and I will not reread it ever.
Nice easy going book. I love hearing about other countries and how people live.
—mm1093
An easy beach read, but well written and funny enough that I laughed out loud.
—nicolaamichelle
I enjoyed every page.
—CaptinBubba
Great beach read!
—kugabana
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