Unraveled Wednesday: 6/7/23

I'm happy to join Kat and fellow Unravelers for Unraveled Wednesday. All I've got for you is a boring photo of the same Hitchhiker, just with a few more teeth. If I squint at it in the right light, I can convince myself that the yarn is starting to change just the slightest bit (getting a bit darker) but I'll admit that I can't see that in the picture. so I'll just keep knitting and see what happens next.

There is darker yarn coming; I can see it more clearly in the ball!

Reading was fairly productive this past week, mainly because I had to catch up on a few Netgalley titles and some library holds I had placed. I read plenty of average three-star (or even 2.5 stars) books that I won't elaborate on here; you can always follow the links to goodreads and see if they might be your cup of tea. The books were While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams, Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, and The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece by Tom Hanks. The Tom Hanks book was such a disappointment, but maybe my expectations were too high. Let's just say it badly needed an editor. 

I finally read Educated by Tara Westover and it was a wild ride, full of violence, accidents, abuse, mental health issues, and thankfully, education. I thought the book deserved four stars and she deserves all the accolades for becoming her own person and her writing. 

Last, I finished a pre-publication copy of Return to Valetto, recommended by Kat. It was another four-star book for me, and since it will be published on June 13, you'll be able to find it next week. I loved The Last Painting of Sara de Vos and even as I requested Return to Valetto from NetGalley, I wondered if the author could come close to recreating that same magic. The answer is yes. This novel tells the story of historian Hugh Fisher heading to a tiny Italian village where his aging aunts still live. This is six years after his wife has died and his daughter Susan is afraid that going to Valetto is just another opportunity to wallow in sadness and never be happy again. Hugh's mother has just died and left him an old stone cottage in Valetto but he finds it occupied by Elsa Tomassi who says that it was promised to her family. There are secrets, betrayals, and wrongs that need to be righted, but the writing was never overly melodramatic, just Smith's lovely prose. I also loved this quote from the book:

"We want history to be a unified narrative, a casual, linear plot that cantilevers across the centuries, but I’ve always pictured it like a filigree of a wrought-iron gate, our unaccountable lives twisting and swooping against a few vertical lines."

What are you making and reading this week?