More from the vacation reading list.
The Friday Night Knitting Club
Kate Jacobs
Having read, re-read and loved Comfort Food for its oddball, honest cast of characters, I was ready to love “The Friday Night Knitting Club” much more than I did. The premise had a lot to love. Set in a yarn store, and centering around a group of strong-minded women, it tells the story of intersecting lives, friendships woven together from yarn, learning, conversation. Kate Jacobs has a gift for writing honest, flawed but endearing and memorable characters. Georgia Walker is a single mother, knitter, and runs the shop Walker and Daughter. Georgia is trying to do what’s best for her daughter, including wrestling with whether to let her father, James, back into their lives. Her daughter, Dakota, is a young teenager with a flair for baking. (A young, outspoken, talented entrepreneur, she reminds me a little of Turtle Wexler from The Westing Game.) Anita, a sharp-dressing senior citizen, helps Georgia in the shop, and is a surrogate grandmother figure (and Broadway matinee buddy) to Dakota.
The store’s regulars include Dakota, an awkard Chinese-American women’s studies grad student studying the role of knitting in 21st century culture. Lucie knits fast when she can’t sleep for worrying about her future. KC can’t focus enough to finish any knitting project. Slowly, awkwardly, the women form a Friday night knitting circle. Subplots that range further than the knitting circle are especially wonderful. Anita’s shy courtship with Marty is a sweet view of romance developing for the older couple. Georgia and Dakota journey to Scotland, to connect with Georgia’s grandmother. the only subplot that distracts, but doesn’t enrich the plot, is the continued intrusions of Georgia’s high school friend Cathy, once a confidante and now a privileged rich wife, chafing at her empty but wealthy marriage. She reaches out to Georgia with a knitting project, a thinly veiled moral theme about the emptiness of Cathy’s material wealth contrasted with the wealth of love Georgia’s family and knitting network share.
I was disappointed with the many ways this novel felt cliched. Some of the plot twists, although heart-wrenching, felt forced, as did elements of dialogue. While reading, I mentioned to my dad that it was much more of a “chick book” than I expected. “Well,” quipped my father, “with a title like that, were you expecting car chases?” A fair point, but even so. Certain plot elements, including the tragedy that drove the book towards its climax and conclusion, felt shoehorned into the warmth of the setting. Although Kate Jacobs’ sensory writing, about food, and the colors of yarn, is just as good as I remember from “Comfort Food,” I felt that “The Friday Night Knitting Club” was forced, lumpy and misshapen, and never quite found a smooth stride. It’s gotten lots of popular attention, and has the kind of women’s fiction plot that means I’m sure the movie rights have already been sold… but thinking that while I’m reading makes me feel let down.
In fairness, I stayed up until stupid late, finishing the novel. But I think it was more out of habit, from the lovely sleepless nights I spent luxuriating in “Comfort Food,” not wanting to leave the characters behind.
