The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I don’t normally read ‘chick lit’ and this book underscored why.
I didn’t have a real problem with the writing style, which included a lot of fragmented sentences, but I did have a problem with the slow start. Jacobs spent quite a bit of time on the outskirts of the story before really getting into the characters and the conflicts. I only started to like the main character of Georgia after I’d gotten frustrated and sampled some later chapters to see if I wanted to continue.
The main threads were pretty standard stuff: feisty woman overcomes odds to become a success, then learns the true meaning of success when she embraces a diverse group of other women and allows herself to lean on them a little. There’s the whole mama-lion thing and the rekindling of a True Love That Was Meant To Be, and even the wise old grandmother with the commonsense boot to the metaphorical butt. Once nearly everyone is happy and fulfilled, of course, is when tragedy strikes.
Despite its obviousness, and a rather rushed ending, I finished it and didn’t feel like throwing it at the wall when I was done. It was an okay way to spend a couple of hours, but these are not women I’d care to hang around with on a regular basis.
Robyn McIntyre - a writing life 
I let this one sit for a while and finally picked it up because I was in a knitting frenzy at the time. I was liking it all right. I mean, it did have every chick lit cliche in the book including the bitchy friend in the group that no one likes but is still always there. Apparently, all women have that. Anyway, I peaced out when the *spoiler alert* cancer plot started. I don’t have a lot of patience for that, especially in chick-lit which I think overuses it to add drama. I realize I’m overly sensitive because I’ve lost a mother to cancer, but I’ve decided life is too short to read cancer books.
Good review. I agree, would not hang out with these people regularly.
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Thanks for dropping in. Yes; this book does have every cliche in it – it was almost like a knitting version of Steel Magnolias’s beauty salon. And I like knitting, but the knitting blurbs prefacing each section of the book were an obvious device and not well integrated. For a real interesting read on life and knitting, you might want to check out: Knitting Around by Elizabeth Zimmerman. It’s nonfiction, but is more engaging than Friday Night Knitting Club.
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