Friday, January 27, 2012

The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club by Gil McNeil

A friend recommended this as a new find and I found that I had already read it - of course, I didn't discover this until after I got the Kindle version. It is pleasant and a quick read, no mystery - just a nice feel-good story.

Jo Mackenzie is resettling with her two young sons in an incredibly British seaside village and taking over her grandmother's yarn shop. This drastic move is a result of the unexpected death of her husband - of course, nothing is quite that simple. He returned from an overseas assignment - he was a television news guy - and told Jo that he was leaving her to marry his mistress of several years. He is so outraged when she does not accept this announcement graciously that he storms out of the house and tears away in his car and promptly piles it into a post or a brick wall or something leaving Jo a widow with no particular reason to go into mourning except that she has always faithfully maintained for her sons the fiction that he was the perfect dad.

She meets people and starts a Stitch and Bitch - in the face of the intense disapproval of her grandmother's long-time employee who doesn't think that name is quite nice. The shop is a success, which it had not been for many years and Jo learns that life goes on.

A nice story. There is rather a lot of the f-bomb - unnecessary, to my way of thinking. Endless repetition does dull the impact, after all. Then there is one bit where a character is outraged because someone referred to a female dog as a "pointer bitch" in front of her daughters. The incident seemed funny to me in the context of the dialogue in the story in general because no character seemed to go more than a dozen words without f-ing something.

Oh well, I did enjoy it, but I think I will go back to the January under $3.99 list and pick a couple before time runs out rather than immediately run and pick up the second book in this series.

No comments:

Post a Comment