Unraveled Wednesday: 1/14/26

I’m happy to join Kat and the Unravelers today, with just a bit of Hitchhiker knitting and a really bad book. 

I'm not sure why I didn't get more knitting done this week. Maybe I was exhausted from wedding dress shopping. (No dress has been chosen yet, but we're going again on Saturday. Oh, goody.) Maybe it was feeling horrified, unsettled, and ungrounded after all the brutal happenings last week. It could be because John decided to change his hotel reservations for Florida next week and ran into some roadblocks that he needed my help with. I bet it was all the time I spent on the phone with the credit card company because we had heating oil delivered and were charged twice for it. Whatever the reasons, I didn't knit as much as I would have liked, but I hope to get much more done during the rest of the week. Especially now that I can watch the next season of All Creatures Great & Small and The Pitt while I knit. 

I did read one of the worst books ever, but I had a reason. I didn't want to be like the book banners that denounce and castigate books without ever reading them, so when I found The Housemaid on hoopla, I decided to give it a try. I wanted to read The Housemaid to better understand why it was so popular. I kept reading largely out of disbelief. I genuinely wasn’t sure if this was meant to be satire, a send-up of domestic thrillers, or if Freida McFadden truly intended the story to be taken at face value. Unfortunately, by the end, it was clear this was meant to be serious.

The plot is utterly ludicrous, stacking one implausible twist on top of another until it collapses under its own weight. Characters are little more than cardboard cutouts, defined by a single trait and never developed beyond what the plot mechanically requires of them. Motivations shift without explanation, and actions feel dictated by shock value rather than logic or psychology.

The writing itself is extremely simplistic, bordering on careless, with little nuance or texture. Any tension is undercut by how obvious and contrived the story becomes. And then there’s the ending, which makes absolutely no sense, even by the book’s already generous suspension-of-disbelief standards.

Thrillers are not usually my genre of choice, but I can appreciate a fast-paced one that makes sense. This one left me more baffled than entertained. I have a certain amount of respect for almost any published author. Freida McFadden has written 30 books, so she clearly knows something. While I still don't understand why this book is so popular, at least I now know this type of book is not for me. This was just one tiny, tarnished star from me. 

What are you making and reading this week?