Product Description

“An intelligent, moving read” (Pages) and “a testament to women’s friendship and to Ann Hood’s talent” (Hilma Wolitzer).

After the sudden loss of her only child, Mary Baxter joins a knitting circle in Providence, Rhode Island, as a way to fill the empty hours and lonely days. The women welcome her, each teaching Mary a new knitting technique and, as they do, revealing their own personal stories of loss, love, and hope. Eventually Mary is able to tell her own story of grief and in so doing reclaims her love for her husband, faces the hard truths about her relationship with her mother, and finds the spark of life again.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76978 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .85" h x 5.54" w x 8.32" l, .62 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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. (Jan.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Ann Hood lost her own young daughter to a rare form of strep, and in this semiautobiographical novel, she reveals the searing pain, the upheaval, and the loss of self that accompany such a heartbreaking event. Critics applauded Hood's intense, unbearably sincere portrayal of grief. However, some felt that the cast of characters was so large and unwieldy that many were caricatures serving merely as vehicles for different steps in the healing process. Those who appreciate the comforting click of knitting needles will find kindred spirits in The Knitting Circle, but it's not necessary to know the difference between casting on and casting off to enjoy this poignant novel.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Review
"The strength of the writing is in the painfully realistic portrayal of the stages of mourning." --Publishers Weekly