Krista (Chrystabel) reviewed The Friday Night Knitting Yawn on 7/5/2009

Helpful Score: 5

Knitting. Friday Nights in NYC several women come together. Heartwarming. At least that was Kate Jacob's aim.

I was very much looking forward to reading this book. The cover is fantastic and the skeins of yarn are so pretty against the black background. I was in the mood for some good female bonding stories and learning more about the art of knitting. The blurbs written by USA Today and Booklist held a lot of promise, as did the many reviews here at PBS. Sadly, I cannot say that this is a book that I would ever recommend to a friend as a good read.

My reasons are as follows:

1-Predictable fluffy plot and predictable PC characters. USA Today wasn't kidding when it says on the front cover: "Like Steel Magnolias set in Manhattan". Yup. That about sums it up.

2-Poor writing style and execution. Way too many sentence fragments. Really. Too many. We also get to visit every character's head but instead of bonding with the characters I felt disconnected and distant from them. A more solid POV could have made this a stronger novel. I really did not care what happened to these people and they reminded me of overdone stereotypes instead of living, breathing human beings.

3-Now, I am all about willingly suspending my disbelief, but some of the characters really stretched my credulity. Are we really supposed to believe that a chronic womanizer will magically mend his ways overnight? Really?

4-Considering how flimsy the material is, this dragged on way too long. I found myself skipping through certain chapters and getting impatient for the plot to move forward.

5-The ending is really bad. Everything is way too pat and melodramatic. It was like bad T.V. from the 80's.

Unfortunately the old "don't judge a book by it's cover" is true for this book. The cover holds so much promise- but the contents do not deliver.

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