Book Club: Friday Night Knitting Club

I’m not particularly religious, but I don’t let that stop me from going all in on holidays. Still, as an adult, Easter was never one that I really got into. I was very close to my grandma and she was aggressively Catholic, so Easter was always a big deal in our house growing up. Now that Mabel the Merciless is old enough to actively participate in egg hunts and solicit kisses from the only socially acceptable furry at the party, we are having our own Easter bash this weekend. Mr. Llama and I took Mabel to our local VFW for a pre-Easter eggstravaganza. She wasn’t sure about the whole thing at first, but she is easily bribed with accessories, and getting to wear her Easter dress was enough to get her in the spirit.

Jac, her husband, and our sister Alena are coming to my place on Saturday to color eggs, play Exploding Kittens, and generally eat an irresponsible amount of ham and green bean casserole. I went super extra-overboard and got Mabel a huge dollhouse from the Easter bunny, so I suppose a decent portion of the day will be spent with Jac giving me some patented side-eye over spoiling her so much. In my defense though, is her Barbie supposed to take the stairs like some sort of plastic-peasant? No. Obviously, she needed the house with the elevator! Anyhow, if I don’t see you between now and then, Happy Easter, if that’s what you’re into!

This week I’ve been reading…

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs and At Knit’s End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (best known as The Yarn Harlot).

At Knit’s End was cute. I rarely read real books anymore and usually listen to audio books while I knit or dye yarn in the stuido. This one probably would have been better as a physical book. It’s really short, but my library had the audio book available and it was nice. Not really a ton to say about it, it’s 50% quotes and 50% a knitting story related to that quote. It wasn’t engaging enough to just sit and listen and knit, but it was great to listen to in the car.

Before I start in on Friday Night Knitting Club, I think it’s worth mentioning that I did not realize that it was a novel. I’d classify it as chick-lit, but it calls itself as a standard fiction novel, so I’ll accept its own literary identity I guess. I thought it was a mystery. I’m not sure why I thought that, but I did, and that didn’t help my experience with it. For the first four hours of that audio book, I kept waiting for someone to die. Or, basically, for anything whatsoever to happen. (SPOILERS AHEAD!) Coincidentally, the main character did die at the end. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

The book centers around Georgia, a single mom of a biracial daughter. You know the daughter is biracial because the author brings it up every now and then in a way that is clearly meant to remind you how enlightened she is. I’m the whitest person I know, basically translucent, and even I was like, “Wow, way to whitesplain racism.” Anyhow, Georgia owns Walker and Daughter, an LYS in Manhattan that is successful despite the fact that it has no formal knitting nights or offers any classes, which are both things that a thriving LYS has and needs to stay that way. And here is where it gets really good: The book seems to believe it invented the concept of a knit along. The main character has this super melodramatic ah-ha moment where she has this genius idea that all the people in their group could knit the same sweater! Who has ever done that?! No one, clearly.

Every now and then a chapter is devoted to one of the side characters, all of whom have crappy lives and no friends. Is that what the author thinks of us? Like, yeah, most people’s lives are less than stellar now and then, and I’m not exactly crushed under the weight of keeping up with all of my close friends, but the drama was so superficial that it was hard to listen to. Most knitting groups are full of people that have friendships outside of the group. And if they don’t, then they at least know literally anything about each other. It didn’t help the authors cause that every character introduced was a progressively bigger and bigger caricature of some loner-lady archetype. For example, one of the character was too much of a feminist to try knitting for a long time, but she came to the group on the pretense of thesis research and stayed because she had no friends. This is pretty much her only human interaction for the week.

Also, do any of you call your finishing work (IE weaving in ends, etc) on a knit “making up”? This book takes place in New York City, which is practically next door to me, and I’ve never heard anyone call it that. There’s this scene where that same feminist caricature is knitting a sweater to send to her husband, who she cheated on, and another woman at the shop tells her that it’s really relevant that when you are ready to finish your sweater it’s called “making-up.” Because, ::wink wink, nudge nudge:: she needs to make up with her husband. See what she did there? Don’t worry, you will, because the book will keep shoving it in your face until you tell it it’s heartwarming just to make it stop.

The only interesting character in the book was Kat, a rich trophy wife of a man that doesn’t love her. Kat and Georgia were best friends in high school until Kat betrayed her their senior year, and they spend the length of the book reconnecting as adults. Kat is no less two-dimensional than the rest of the characters, but her storyline was the most entertaining. In the end, they take a trip to Scotland and then Georgia comes back and finds out she has cancer. It’s bad cancer, but they can treat it. She has surgery and chemo. Everything goes well until on the exact night one of the other knitters goes into labor, Georgia gets a bowel obstruction and dies shortly thereafter at the hospital. When I was applying to med schools, there was this joke:

“We’re glad cancer didn’t kill grandma, but it will definitely kill your admissions essay.”

The premise is that it’s a trope that’s overdone, and if an admissions officer has to read one more essay about how inspired you were by grandma’s compassionate doctors when you were seven, they will probably gauge their eyes out. I seriously sympathized with admissions officers at the end of this book. Fine, have the character get cancer and fight cancer it. Maybe even kill them off with cancer. But the cancer plot line had run its course and then the author realized she didn’t have an ending. The slap-dashed result is a cancer complication, and 48 hours later the main character fades to black. Georgia leaves her daughter a journal with the “secret to knitting the perfect sweater,” which seemed to be entirely about picking the best yarn. Obviously, I love yarn. But it’s not the secret to knitting anything. Even cashmere won’t knit itself.

So yeah. As an avid knitter, I was not a fan of the book or how it portrayed the community. Maybe the sequels are better? I feel like I should apologize for being so harsh, but this book owes me 10 hours of my life back.

Based on suggestions from the Book Club Forum Thread, I have a fine selection of actual mysteries in my queue at the library. I’m on the wait list for Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, The Lost Days of Agatha Christie by Carole Owens, and A Fatal Grace and Still Life by Louise Penny. For next week, I’m going with a sure thing and re-reading another Dresden Files book. I’m on White Night right now. The Dresden Files aren’t perfect books, but they are a perfect palate cleanser. There’s a new book of Dresden short stories coming out in June, so I want to re-read them all by then.

Currently on my needles…

I have a bunch of WIPs right now, but I did actually finish something on time this week. I finished it early. I’m worried that this is going to cause some sort of cosmic imbalance.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bg4vb7KnI3g/?taken-by=doctor_llama

But, as long as I don’t knock the universal entropy out of whack with my uncharacteristic timeliness, this was a fun, easy project. I made the Traveling Cables baby hat by Purl Soho for a friend’s soon-to-be-baby. I also cast on some socks that I do not have time for, which is my favorite kind of project.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgzjFk6H4NN/?taken-by=doctor_llama

Mostly, right now, I’m on the edge of my seat, dying to release the first Nessie Expedition clue. It’s dropping tomorrow, and it’s hard for me to keep the M in MKAL sometimes. I love mystery knit alongs exponentially more than KALs, but my discipline gets tested every time I have to not show off a project I’m really proud of until the end of the MKAL. But I’ve mostly stayed strong. I did put out one spoiler. Just one though, and we can all agree that mathematically one is very close to zero. So if you round down, I managed not to spoil anything.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgrXVpzHaud/?taken-by=doctor_llama

~Megan-Anne

And you know what else? The book came with a muffin recipe, but not a knitting pattern. Lame.