I FINALLY FOUND A BOOK I LOVE AND WILL FINISH

The Knitting Circle: A Novel by Ann Hood

I started reading this book a week ago. I am trying to find books for next year's reading/discussion series called "Neighbors".

I thought this books might be one for the group. I started reading it and I have a hard time putting it down.

While mourning the death of her daughter, Hood (An Ornithologist's Guide to Life) learned to knit. In her comeback novel, Mary Baxter, living in Hood's own Providence, R.I., loses her five-year-old daughter to meningitis. Mary and her husband, Dylan, struggle to preserve their marriage, but the memories are too painful, and the healing too difficult. Mary can't focus on her job as a writer for a local newspaper, and she bitterly resents her emotionally and geographically distant mother, who relocated to Mexico years earlier. Still, it's at her mother's urging that Mary joins a knitting circle and discovers that knitting soothes without distracting. The structure of the story quickly becomes obvious: each knitter has a tragedy that she'll reveal to Mary, and if there's pleasure to be had in reading a novel about grief, it's in guessing what each woman's misfortune is and in what order it will be exposed. The strength of the writing is in the painfully realistic portrayal of the stages of mourning, and though there's a lot of knitting, both actual and metaphorical, the terminology's simple enough for nonknitters to follow and doesn't distract from the quick pace of the narrative.

I love this book. It will be part of next years bookgroup. Part of my being so into the book, was the horror of thinking what if this had happened to me with Jennifer or even if it happened now. Would I survive and be able to function.

sue