The Friday Night Knitting Club | Kate Jacobs

The Friday Night Knitting Club | Kate Jacobs | A Good, Fun Read...Not One of My Top Favorites Though

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The Friday Night K...

	The Friday Night Knitting Club Kate Jacobs Berkley Trade, 2008 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 190 reviews view larger image
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Good airplane reading.

I enjoyed the book for what it was, (fun reading on a plane). It was a little more realistic than many of the books of this genre. Even though the book touched on race and religion a little, that could have been developed more. The main character is built up by her friends as being their rock, however, I don't really see why. She avoids conflict and avoids checking up on her health and her spiritual self when she really could have done better. I don't really see why she was so mad with her parents. Even though they weren't excited about the baby, her Dad did make a crib for goodness sake! Isn't that huge effort worth something?She really should have read James' letters when he sent them. A lot of heartache could have been avoided! Also, why did she take her daughter to Scotland when the daughter really wanted to go to Baltimore? Nevertheless - Many of the issues brought up in the story were very close to home and caused me to think a little (which I usually don't end up doing when I read this sort of book). Good effort for a first book.

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A Good, Fun Read...Not One of My Top Favorites Though

I felt like the story started out slow, but once the author delved into the world of each of these remarkable characters, I was able to get to know them and really be able to relate. That is when I started to enjoy the novel. All of the women come together to the knitting club, and this club is sort of the foundation that holds all these unique women together. And then there's Georgia, who is pretty much the glue that holds this foundation together. The reader will quickly fall in love with her and admire her for her sturdiness, compassion, and independence.
So far so good right? Yes! But the ending left me very upset because even though maybe it was inevitable how it should end, I think the author could have done a better job at concluding. Maybe that is where her lack of skill as a writer is demonstrated. Overall though, her writing was captivating, funny, and exceptional.

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A bit too much...

Overall, this was a sweet story of friendship and of women working together to support one another, with knitting but also with life issues.

Here are the problems... (spoilers!)

I really think the author tried to cram in too much here. Georgia is a single mother with business sense and ambition. That's great. But the absentee father of her daughter happens to be black, making her daughter bi-racial. When he comes back into their lives (too easily to be convincing) she tells him that she's read up on issues of biracial children and how to help Dakota deal with whatever she might encounter because of it. James is skeptical. But then that's over... Dakota never has to deal with any race-related issues at all, so we don't know how that issue is resolved.

Lucie gets herself pregnant by a guy she met on the Internet, but she evidently never tells him or her family that she's having a baby. She even mentions at one point that she's not going to tell her parents about the baby, but don't you think they're going to find out eventually? And she goes to Georgia for advice about being a single mom, but Georgia never once asks who the father is or how he feels about fatherhood? One would think that as a single parent, Georgia would encourage her to get the father involved, since she knows how hard it is to do it completely alone. But no, that's never mentioned.

Darwin cheats on her long-distance husband with a friend of a friend. She finally confesses this to him on the phone, and he hangs up on her. But the next time they mention him, it's when he shows up on Darwin's doorstep, ready to forgive her. Hello? What transpired in between?

KC goes to law school, but what was the point of her character? She just seemed like filler to me. She didn't really add anything for me.

I do appreciate trying to make the story complex with so many storylines, but there are so many things left unresolved or skimmed over. I'll give Jacobs's next novel a try, but I'm curious about how she would respond to this.

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