The Quilter's Apprentice

April 5, 1999
Quilting is the overall motif of this leisurely paced, predictable first novel, set in a small Pennsylvania college town. Young Sarah McClure, an accountant tired of number-crunching, has accompanied her landscaper husband to the area, but she soon finds that jobs are few and uninteresting. Discouraged, she agrees to do housework on a temporary basis at Elm Creek Manor, a mansion on the edge of town. The manor's occupant, Sylvia Compson, an embittered master quilter and widow in her 70s, has returned to the family home following the death of her sister to ready it for sale. Sylvia's story, told with increasingly long flashbacks and confidences during the private quilting lessons she agrees to give Sarah, reveal a tormented family history of wealth and privilege ruined by tragedy. Sarah's sympathy for Sylvia is juxtaposed against the innuendoes she hears at meetings of the Tangled Web Quilters, a group of local women who mistrust Sylvia. Meant to be a sympathetic catalyst, Sarah comes across as whiny instead of plucky, and the book is burdened by far too many descriptions of her job interviews and subsequent insecurities. Chiaverini is at her best when describing the manor and its once grand history, but her prose is merely serviceable and the dialogue is stilted. Sure to be compared to Whitney Otto's How to Make an American Quilt, this novel fails to connect on an emotional level. Author tour.

A patchwork quilt is such a good metaphor for life, and author Chiaverini tells of life and quilts with a light and steady hand. A young woman, Sarah, works for an elderly, grumpy woman, Mrs. Compson, who is a master quilter and a master storyteller. As Sarah learns to sew pieces together on her first sampler quilt, Mrs. Compson pieces together the stories of her ancestral home. Sailing through an array of characters, Christina Moore is especially good as Mrs. Compson, getting her upper-crust hauteur and sense of humor just right. As with the dark and light patches in a quilt, life brings sadness and joy, and Mrs. Compson has lived such a life. Along with the tricks of the trade of quilting, Sarah learns lessons for life. This is a most pleasant book that many a quilting bee should listen to (between gossip and snacks.) B.H.B. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine