The Friday Night Knitting Club
By Kate Jacobs
Penguin, 2007

I like to knit. I especially like to knit on Friday nights when family, house, work, and cats are all quiet. So when I saw The Friday Night Knitting Club at Barnes & Noble, I wanted to love it. It sounded like good fun chick lit, and I was in the mood. Unfortunately the mood didn't last—not because of the story, but because of the way it's told.

Georgia Walker owns Walker & Daughter, a Manhattan knitting goods store. The story revolves around Georgia, her 12-year-old daughter Dakota, close friend and mentor Anita Lowenstein, and various members of the knitting club. There's an old friend of Georgia's from high school, too, and Dakota's long-absent father. As events unfold, the club members are drawn together, their shared craft becoming a metaphor for their intertwined and sometimes knotted-up lives.

It's a good enough premise, but the author makes it tough to care. The multiple points of view make it hard to follow one character for long—just when I'm starting to warm up to Dakota's dad, we're on to Georgia's whiny friend Cat. These people are plenty predictable, too: Darwin joins the club as part of her undercover graduate research on how knitting undermines the feminist movement. Any guesses how her thesis actually turns out? And some moments are just plain hard to swallow. Would a husband really forgive his wife's infidelity just because she knits him an ugly sweater? And then there's the dialogue, which at times feels preachy and heavy-handed. Georgia's Scottish grandmother even admits it: "But I'm not wise," she says. "All I'm preaching is common sense."

A number of conventions can't help but seem calculated. Each section begins with knitting instructions that serve as thinly-veiled metaphors for life ("learn new stitches and see how far you can go"). Dakota's muffin recipe at the end feels cute but trendy. Knitting customers are told to visit walkeranddaughter.com—and yes, it's an actual URL. And the let's-make-a-video portion of the plot is an obvious device for turning the book into a movie (currently in production for 2009). Nice marketing ploys, but not necessarily good literature.

Still, I stuck with it, all the way to the tragedy at the end. I just wish the author had done a better job. And rather than reading this book, I wish I'd spent the weekend knitting.

Rating:

–Reviewed by Laurie Herr