Rather than harmonizing disparate scraps, this quilt leaves the highly wrought patches unstitched.
Quiltsgiving is a new tradition at Elm Creek Manor, and this November, the women will devote themselves to making quilts for Project Linus, which gathers homemade blankets for needy children. In giving to others, they may heal themselves.
The latest in Chiaverini’s (Sonoma Rose, 2012, etc.) prolific Elm Creek Quilts series finds women gathering at Elm Creek Manor. Focusing on five of the participants, Chiaverini relates each woman’s sufferings in mind-numbing detail. A member of the renowned Cherokee Rose Quilters, Pauline has forsaken her own guild’s retreat to come to the Manor. Although she loves her guild, she cannot understand why one of the other members is so hostile toward her. Hostilities have escalated so far that she is contemplating leaving her beloved guild. Linnea, a librarian, has spent the last months battling Close the Book, an organization intent upon closing her library, and the tempers get hotter every day. Michaela, the youngest quilter at the retreat, arrives on crutches, her ankle ruined and her dreams of professional cheerleading dashed. But was her fall at tryouts an accident or something more sinister? Recently widowed, Jocelyn has stepped into her late husband’s role of coaching their school’s Imagination Quest. Working with the children was fantastic, but possible cheating at the competition troubles her. Karen, one of the most talented quilters, worries that her beloved shop may not survive in the face of Internet stores. The women bond in conversation, telling their stories, detailing their slights and questioning their own reactions. These ironically self-centered women gain much more from Quiltsgiving than they give. Project Linus becomes little more than the backdrop for yet another story about women offering each other support to return home and face their troubles.
Rather than harmonizing disparate scraps, this quilt leaves the highly wrought patches unstitched.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-525-95360-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
Connelly takes a break from his Harry Bosch police novels (The Last Coyote, p. 328, etc.) for something even more intense: a reporter's single-minded pursuit of the serial killer who murdered his twin. Even his buddies in the Denver PD thought Sean McEvoy's shooting in the backseat of his car looked like a classic cop suicide, right clown to the motive: his despondency over his failure to clear the murder of a University of Denver student. But as Sean's twin brother, Jack, of the Rocky Mountain News, notices tiny clues that marked Sean's death as murder, his suspicions about the dying message Sean scrawled inside his fogged windshield—"Out of space. Out of time"—alert him to a series of eerily similar killings stretching from Sarasota to Albuquerque. The pattern, Jack realizes, involves two sets of murders: a series of sex killings of children, and then the executions (duly camouflaged as suicides) of the investigating police officers. Armed with what he's dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI. The real fireworks begin as Jack trades his official silence for an inside role in the investigation, only to find himself shut out of both the case and the story. From then on in, Jack, falling hard for Rachel Walling, the FBI agent in charge of the case, rides his Bureau connections like a bucking bronco—even as one William Gladden, a pedophile picked up on a low-level charge in Santa Monica, schemes to make bail before the police can run his prints through the national computer, then waits with sick patience for his chance at his next victim. The long-awaited confrontation between Jack and Gladden comes at an LA video store; but even afterward, Jack's left with devastating questions about the case. Connelly wrings suspense out of every possible aspect of Jack's obsessive hunt for his brother's killer. Prepare to be played like a violin.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-316-15398-2
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
