Knit the Season (Jacobs)

Knit the Season (Friday Night Knitting Club #3)
Kate Jacobs
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425236765

In Brief
Knit the Season is a loving, moving, laugh-out-loud celebration of special times with friends and family.

The story begins a year after the end of Knit Two, with Dakota Walker's trip to spend the Christmas holidays with her Gran in Scotland—accompanied by her father, her grandparents, and her mother's best friend, Catherine. Together, they share a trove of happy memories about Christmases past with Dakota's mom, Georgia Walker—from Georgia's childhood to her blissful time as a doting new mom. From Thanksgiving through Hanukkah and Christmas to New Year's, Knit the Season is a novel about the richness of family bonds and the joys of friendship. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Born—N/A
• Raised—near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• Education—B.A., Carleton University (Ottowa); M.A., New
   York University
• Currently—lives near Los Angeles, California, USA

Kate Jacobs is the New York Times bestselling author of Comfort Food, Knit Two, and The Friday Night Knitting Club, which has over 1 million copies in print.

Kate grew up near Vancouver, British Columbia, in the scenic and delightfully named town of Hope (pop. 6,184). It’s an area filled with friends and family and Kate loves to visit. Back then, of course, it was tremendously boring, as only home can be to a teenager. As a result, Kate begged her parents to send her to boarding school in Victoria, BC. From there she traded in her navy blazer to earn a Bachelor’s degree in journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa. Next, in a fit of optimism/courage/naivete—take your pick—she followed it up with a move to bustling New York City (pop. 8,143,197).

The plan? Breaking into magazine publishing. First she received a Master’s degree at NYU and worked at a handful of unpaid internships, then got a spot as an assistant to the Books & Fiction Editor at Redbook magazine. It was here that Kate answered multiple phones, read a ton of slush (getting to know some wonderful writers-to-be), and began to experience the impact of sharing women’s stories. Around this time, Kate settled into an apartment complex that housed about as many people as her entire hometown in Canada: It seemed that she wasn’t just a small-town girl anymore.

Professionally, Kate made it a priority to explore content that resonated with women: She was an editor at Working Woman and Family Life and was later a freelance writer and editor at the website for Lifetime Television. Personally, as a newcomer to New York, she learned the power of building a surrogate family and stitching together friendship connections that will endure. Exploring the richness of women’s relationships is a key focus of her novels.

After a decade of Manhattan living, Kate moved to sunny Southern California with her husband. (And discovered that she likes suburban living just fine, thank you very much.)

She relished the idea of her very own home office but found herself setting up the laptop on the dining table, just as she’d done in New York, and writing late at night in her pajamas.

A firm believer in the creative power of free time, Kate loves to recharge by tackling knitting projects that she can finish quickly (all the better to feel that sense of accomplishment). She’s also a fan of taking naps, especially when she’s on deadline, snuggling under a favorite green-and-yellow afghan knitted by her grandmother decades ago. Her beloved liver-and-white English Springer Spaniel, Baxter, often snoozes alongside. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
In this holiday special, friends brought together by a Manhattan knitting shop continue to gather for their weekly knitting sessions, this time focusing on Dakota, the young daughter of the shop's original owner. Dakota is running the shop and attending culinary school, intending to revamp the shop as a knitting café. Feeling overwhelmed, she decides to visit her grandmother in Scotland to gain some perspective and learns a lot about her late mother in the process.
Library Journal

Bland and predictable third installment of the Friday Night Knitting Club series (Knit Two, 2008, etc.). Georgia, founder and proprietor of Walker & Daughter yarn shop, died in the first novel, leaving daughter Dakota to be raised by formerly absentee father James and the knitting club stalwarts. Now 21-year-old Dakota is in culinary school and dreams of turning Walker & Daughter (run by Peri, when she's not designing handbags) into a knitting cafe. While making plans for this transition, Dakota wants everything to stay the same, but everything is changing. Octogenarian Anita is finally marrying her boyfriend, despite her wormy son Nathan's attempts to break them up. Darwin and Lucie are even more involved with their children. Catherine is going to marry Marco and maybe move to Italy. Peri has been asked by a couture label to move to Paris and run their knit division. And James has finally met a woman he's serious about. This is all too much for Dakota, who deeply feels Georgia's absence and associates change with loss. Maybe Christmas abroad will cheer her up. She relinquishes an important internship to travel with James, Georgia's parents and brother to visit her great-grandmother on a farm in Scotland. There Dakota learns important life lessons: Family is important, time is precious, unpleasant memories can be good and other homilies more appropriate to YA lit. Jacobs' prose is pleasant, and she smoothly juggles all the story lines, but there's just not much going on here. Numerous mentions of woolen goods neither improve the plotting nor make the characters more endearing. A quick stroll through familiar emotional territory rather than the epic voyage of self-discovery the author seems to have intended.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Knit the Season:

1. What picture of Georgia Walker emerges from the reveries and flashbacks of the characters in this latest installment of the Friday Night Knitting Club series? What does Dakota come to learn about her mother? If you've read The FNKC and Knit Two, what more do you learn about Georgia? What new information is filled in for you?

2. In what ways has Georgia influenced her friends' lives and and how does her spirit continue to knit them together?

3. Relationships (family, friends, and lovers) are at the heart of this novel, as they are in FNKC and Knit Two. If you've read the first two, how have those relationships developed? What new (or old) stresses affect the characters? Catherine, for instance, and Anita and her son? If this is the first book you've read in the series...then talk about the relationships and their stress points as they exist now.

4. Darwin and Lucie, two of the series' more interesting characters, are somewhat relegated to the sidelines in this third book. Would you like to have seen more of them? What is fraying the edges of their friendship?

5. Talk about Dakota's career goals and the competing demands she feels? How does Peri's decision to make a move complicate things for Dakota?

6. Knit the Season, in many ways, is a coming-of-age story for Dakota. What anxieties must she overcome? What does she come to understand by the book's conclusion? What does she learn about herself and the choices she faces regarding career and family?

7. What do you believe is the central message found in Knit the Season?

8. How does this third book stack up against the others in the series? How important is it to have read the first two? If this is your first foray into Jacobs' Friday Night Knitting Club series, does this book make you want to read the previous two?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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