Unraveled Wednesday: 7/5/2023

I'm joining Kat and fellow Unravelers with my new Sparkly Hitch on the Move.

The sparkles in the black aren't very evident in the photo, but they are there. I'm not sure that I love these yarns together (yet) but I'm following Kym's Rule of Knitting Real Estate ©. This states that the knitter should make sure that they knit enough on the piece to ensure that they are making a valid assessment. So I'm going to keep going (and I even have the yarn picked out for my next one)!

I've knit plenty of Hitchhikers and thought that this pattern would be similar, but instead of using bind-offs to form the teeth, these triangles are seemingly formed by magic! It's hard for me to stop before I've completed a triangle but I really do appreciate the clever construction and it's easy to keep knitting. 

The Forget-Me-Not Hitchhiker makes a nice bit of mindless, mindful knitting to work on after I've knit a triangle or two on the Sparkly Hitch on the Move. I do like how the color gradations are turning out and have picked out a couple of choices for my next Hitchhiker, too.

I finished Birnam Wood and while it was different from other fiction I've read, I don't think it was my cup of tea. Maybe my expectations were too high; maybe Eleanor Catton just isn't an author for me, or maybe it's some combination of the two, but this book was less than I had hoped. The ideas of an eco-thriller and guerilla gardening were both interesting to me, but the execution fell flat. The beginning was a bit slow when the reader is introduced to the characters, but despite some excruciating detailed descriptions, many of them felt like stereotypical caricatures. The rich, evil villain (I could almost imagine him twirling his Snidely Whiplash mustache!), idealistic yet clueless activists, and aspiring journalist Tony who argues with everyone about everything and is a premiere mansplainer came together for an ending that felt rushed and too far over the top for a literary author.

But I also finished Little Monsters and this was much more a book for me. I loved Adrienne Brodeur's wild memoir, Wild Game, so I was anxious to read this work of fiction, Little Monsters. It's almost as good as her memoir. Brodeur clearly knows family secrets, lies, dynamics, complexities, and dysfunction and they are all evident in this tale of the Gardners. Patriarch Adam is a marine biologist with bipolar disorder; son Ken is an arrogant real estate developer with political ambitions and a lot of rage, and daughter Abby is an artist living in the studio that her architect mother designed but is owned by her brother. Ken and Abby lost their mother in childbirth when Abby was born and that began the family's traumas. The family is planning a 70th birthday party for Adam who has gone off his meds in hopes of one last scientific discovery. Needless to say, the party does not go as expected.

This novel is set on Cape Cod which Brodeur also knows well and her descriptions are lush and detailed. Each chapter alternates between five different characters' voices and the multiple points of view are an interesting way to tell the story. While I was reading Wild Game I kept saying to myself, "I can't believe this is happening!", knowing that those events really did happen in the author's life. As a work of fiction, Little Monsters is missing that small piece but it's still a 4.5-star book for me.

What are you making and reading this week?