The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs

There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. The female cast is likeable, but Jacobs pushes hard the idea of knitting as a metaphor for life, which thickens the novel’s syrupy Lifetime Channel melodrama until it congeals into a bizarre ending.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Readers are encouraged to visit a website devoted to the book for knitting tips and patterns. Jacobs seems all too aware of her book’s niche market potential. (Jacobs touches on race-Georgia is white-but it serves as little more than an exotic grace note in an otherwise standard romance plot.) The novel’s most successful stretch takes place in Scotland, far away from the knitting shop and the club, when Georgia visits her wisdom-dispensing grandmother with her 12-year-old daughter Dakota and her spoiled, ex-socialite best friend in tow. Its true focus is Georgia’s romance, past and possibly present, with Dakota’s father James, a handsome, charming, successful black architect who has reappeared on the scene after a 12-year absence. The novel follows the threads of their criss-crossing lives-more or less. Every Friday, a quirky group of women gathers at the shop for food, gossip and tips. Georgia Walker, a single mother in her gorgeous late 30s, runs a specialty knitting shop in midtown Manhattan. A Steel Magnolias for the 21st-century set in a New York City knitting shop.ĭebut novelist Jacobs capitalizes on last year’s hot knitting trend with this laughs-and-tears women’s novel.

The Friday Night Knitting Club by Kate Jacobs