The Knitting Circle

THE KNITTING CIRCLE develops like the practice of knitting itself--there are familiar patterns and recurring steps that are revealed as the plot unfolds. Protagonist Mary joins a knitting circle as a distraction after her daughter's sudden death. The people she meets there help her to come to terms with her tragedy. Hillary Huber is a capable reader whose strength lies in her phrasing and her use of a well-timed pause. Her voice is at its most pleasing when she uses it as a tool for narration rather than assuming the voices of the many characters. The novel is fraught with metaphors that liken knitting to life, and those comparisons neatly parallel each circle member's history. L.B.F. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

October 9, 2006
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.