Life, death and knitting

I downloaded 'The Friday Night Knitting Club' by Kate Jacobs from the Audiobook Library, mainly because of the knitting, but have quite enjoyed it. It was definitely in the realm of 'chick lit', a story about a group of women, their friendships and their lives, nothing too demanding or challenging.

Georgia owns the knitting shop where they meet, and is a single mom to Dakota, struggling with the reappearance of James, Dakota's father. Anita is the long term widow, devoted friend, but also looking to her own future and getting annoyed at the interference of her grown-up children. Darwin is this weird student, researching 'women's issues' who comes to observe but not to knit. Lucie is a TV producer with a yen for a baby. Peri is the shop assistant who really wants to design handbags. KC is Georgia's former boss, mainly just turning up to be sociable. And Cat is a former schoolmate of Georgia's, now living the high life but wanting to escape an unhappy marriage. So they all have their little quirks and concerns, and their own separate story lines, that come together when they have their meetings, time to knit and eat cookies. The main story though follows Georgia and Dakota and their changing relationship as Dakota gets older and the arrival of her father disrupts their nice cosy twosome. It was all very neat and predictable ... that is until she killed off Georgia and then it got trite and sentimental.

I was not totally convinced that the author knew anything about knitting. She had this cute little knitting metaphor thing going on at the start of each chapter, but it sounded a bit like she had read some knitting books and cobbled it together; lots of tired clichés about the troubles that beginners get into and the *really* tired cliché about a jumper with one sleeve too long and one too short, I mean if you can actually knit a jumper who the hell can't measure the sleeves and make them the same size, what a pile of nonsense. So all in all a pleasant little tale of female friendship and how it makes your life better to share your problems and how friends all pitch in to help each other when the times get rough. It will make a nice heartwarming film.