A Gluttony of Food Books

Has anyone else noticed this? (And I don't mean my likely totally improper use of the word "gluttony".) Food books are everywhere. Seriously everywhere.

Comfort Food by Kate Jacobs
3 stars
R-2

Written in a somewhat similar style as The Friday Night Knitting Club, Comfort Food is the story of a woman and her family-- both blood and otherwise. Gus is an engaging main character, most of the time, at least, and her family is definitely quirky.

Unfortunately... it just wasn't as well done as Friday Night Knitting Club.

Maybe that's not fair. Maybe I shouldn't compare. But, really, the style just didn't work for this one.

Because of the jumping from character to character, it sometimes takes part of the novel to get a feel for the characters. In Comfort Food, this is more successful for some characters than others.

One character was totally superfluous. I mean, she was likeable enough, but seriously superfluous. You could have taken her out completely and not noticed.

Like I said, though, I did like Gus. And you do get a decent depth on most of the characters by the end of it all.

But I was hoping for better.

A Point I Forgot to Make...

From Knit Two. According to Dakota (who is about 18 in this book) email is a thing of the past.

I'm not even kidding.

She tries to check her email frequently because most of her friends are at least a decade older than her and still think email is the way to go.

Apparently I am officially old, given that I far prefer email to texting.

Who knew?

A Knitting Sequel

Knit Two by Kate Jacobs

3.75 stars

R- 3

Sequel to The Friday Night Knitting Club

Let me start by saying I really enjoyed the first book. And I liked this one.

But.... well, now I can see why every author that I've ever wished would write a sequel because as a reader I really want to know what happens to my favorite characters.... doesn't.

Because as much as I liked the characters and as fun as it is to learn what happened to them, if that's the only reason behind the sequel (reader curiosity) then it may feel a bit... forced. And this one did. The laundry lists of some of what everyone had been doing over the last five years... combined with the hinting about others things was just kind of stilted.

Don't get me wrong, I still liked it. The characters are still engaging, even if they are sometimes aggravating. And even if they sometimes completely contradict themselves on the same page. (Which they do. Darwin was starting to drive me nuts.)

In some ways, this makes them more real, but who was it that said something about things happening in real life or bad fiction? Sometimes it's possible to have characters that are just too real.

I'm not calling this bad fiction, really I'm not. It was a good read. I understand Darwin's dilemas even when they drove me crazy, and I'm glad that in her 40s Catherine finally figures life out... sort of. More or less anyway. And it's good to know that Anita isn't 100% perfect all the time. Her son is a scumbag, but what can you do. (And *SPOILER ALERT* that really should have been resolved. Honestly.) (Okay, that wasn't much of a spoiler... I really try to avoid spoilers.)

In the end, I guess the message is that life goes on. Whether we make good choices or bad, whether we like it or not.

And that's good to know.