-- FICTION
Like television shows, books about friends getting together are always popular. This explains why Kate Jacobs' "The Friday Night Knitting Club" was a best-seller -- and why fans will welcome "Knit Two," the sequel.
Their popularity is probably a legacy of childhood when we consumed books about friends who solved mysteries and fought crime, and a good writer can make much of a genre that relies on familiarity as much as plot. Jacobs, though, is more conventional than original, and the characters are a central-casting cliché.
Five years along, the former cast members, with one exception, are present to experience a year of challenges, disappointments and happy outcomes. The exception is Georgia, the founder of the club and the owner of Walker and Daughter Yarn Shop in New York. Georgia has died of ovarian cancer, and each year the club organizes a walk in her memory.
As the story begins, the club is meeting on its usual Friday at the store. Peri, who now runs the shop, is anxious for their comments on the alterations she has made; Dakota, Georgia's daughter, a student at New York University, knows she want to be a baker, not a knitter; Lucie, a single mother, is finding daughter Ginger exhausting as her documentary-filmmaker career flourishes; Darwin, a feminist academic, is expecting twins; KC is now counsel to her old publishing firm; Catherine owns a successful antiques and gifts store, but her love life is rocky; and Anita, the long-widowed oldest member, has a new beau but is reluctant to remarry until some unfinished family business is resolved.
Over the summer, the club scatters but keeps in touch. Lucie is in Italy making a video, with Dakota along to help with Ginger, and Catherine's there to advise on shopping and reassess her life. Her reassessment is complicated when she meets Marco, a winemaker, whose handsome adolescent son also attracts Dakota. Anita joins them soon as well -- her search for her younger sister Sarah, with whom she quarreled decades ago, seems to be a failure. And back in New York, Darwin finally becomes a committed knitter.
Happy endings are balanced by a few life-blows, but the friends are as close as before. Which is to be expected in a story that celebrates keeping in touch and moving on, rather than plumbing the darker recesses of the human heart. Fans and knitters will especially enjoy.
Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.
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