The Cross-Country Quilters

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Chiaverini, Jennifer
On Shelf At: Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Chiaverini, Jennifer	4-week checkout	On Shelf

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

mediocre writing submitted by camelsamba on July 16, 2012, 1:07pm This is a book about five women who quilt. Two of them knew each other online, one is a total beginner (an actress who needs to learn to quilt for a role), one is a spunky elderly woman, one is a quilt artist. We get to see snippets of their lives, then they come together and meet one another during a week at Elm Creek Quilt Camp. They end up making a pact to work on a 'challenge block' over the course of the ensuing year and meet again at camp the following year.

I haven't read any other books in this series, so had no expectations for what should happen in an Elm Creek Quilters story. The plot covered some serious issues - divorce, troubled child due to estranged father, domestic abuse, long-term chronic illness and its effect on an artist, artistic decline of an actress, etc. In the end, most of these threads resolve into "be true to yourself" to find a way through your troubles. Everything ties up neat and tidy at the end, the proverbial happy ending(s). But as I read the book, a few things were nagging me. The writing quality was fairly inconsistent - sometimes the style got pedantic and annoying. Aren't editors supposed to smooth over this? Many points were blatantly obvious - for example, the plot with Lindsay and her fiancé, I predicted that one as soon as she was introduced. So if you want something light and fluffy and don't mind predicting a resolution 200 pages before it happens, read this. If you want masterful lyrical language, look elsewhere.