After 88 pages of this slow-moving book filled with alternating chapters of quilting instructions and the stories of women in a sleepy California town, I gave up. The movie was much better. ( )

- read for the March Book-a-Month Challenge 2008This is the story of several women in a quilting group in a small town in California. A different woman's story is told in each chapter, and, for each story, the author provides an analogy to some aspect of quilt-making. As each woman's story is told, the reader also gets occasional glimpses of the other women through another's eyes. It's an engaging look into the lives of several very different women who still manage to come together to create quilts. ( )

Although a short book, this was a difficult read. It never came together for me. I did not like the vague instructions of quilting. And the only thing I really learned about quilting was that it would be tedious from all aspects. As for the characters and their story--jeez, she was all over the map and I still don't know squat about them. By the time I got to the end, she just abrubtly stopped. I think if she had kept her focus on Glady and Hy or Marianna and Anna, or even the just the men, it would have much for a much better story. As it is you're left with a bunch of pieces and absolutely no clue as to how to put them together. ( )

Whitney Otto has fashioned a book which has an intersting theme. The book focuses on the lives of six members of a quilting bee. While these days there have been books on book groups, knitting groups, etc., this was one of the first books to tell the story of people through a group acitvity. ( )

This is the story of different women working on a "crazy quilt" and how each brings their own life experiences into the design. The chapters switch off from explaining quilting techniques to describing a character's life. The only drawback to the story was that each section jumped from one topic to the next, and in the case of the women's life experiences, it would jump from their childhood to their middle age and back again, all in the space of a few paragraphs. That was probably the only thing that kept me from loving this book, I liked it but I didn't love it.