Better-than-average three-young-women-finding-love chicklit. The difference is that the characters actually manage to grow up a little over the course of the book.

LaZebnik has a breezy style and chooses the background and a main plot point from topics she understands. (Read the "About the Author" section if you're interested.) The point is that the knitting components of the book are natural rather than feeling grafted on (sorry; a little knitting pun there), and the sections dealing with autistic children are spot-on.

One of the women, Sari, was driven to work with autistic children because her brother is afflicted. As the story progresses, she has to re-evaluate everything she thought she understood about her motivations.

Lucy's medical research work fits well with her mildly OCD personality, but circumstances push her off a path she thought was carefully defined.

And Kathleen, the carefree, impulsive, and easily-bored member of the trio has to figure out the difference between burning bridges and building them.

It's still a breezy read, but it won't leave you with a sugar-hangover. ( )

This book wasn't what I was expecting, but I mostly enjoyed it. The novel follows three women in their thirties who have a weekly knitting circle. I think the part that got me most was how resilient they were to "grow up," which was a much larger part of the story than the knitting. I also have other feelings about the choices, but for the sake of saving the spoilers for later, I'll refrain. ( )

On the surface this novel is a standard piece of 'women's literature', a book telling a story about women, for women, and the sort of book my mom reads far too often, and that gets my hackles up. After all, I read books written about men and that may have in more sexist times been expected to be read by men, so what makes this 'women's lit' stuff different? Is it impossible for a man to enjoy a book about women? I don't think so, and I think that the issues addressed in this novel are ones a man might be interested in too. Actually, for men dealing with raising an autistic child or men who have autistic siblings, this book might be a good read.

So, while I, the eternal tomboy at heart, had a hard time getting into this novel, and never really liked the three main protagonists, I did actually enjoy the book enough to recommend it to others, even men. I wish that the characters were less caricatured, and maybe that there were fewer main story arcs so that the remaining story could be developed more fully; I do find that a common failing of 'chick lit' is that it is carocatured and shallow, in the sense of not being fully developed, and this novel, to me, seemed a perfect example of this. I also was annoyed that autism in this novel is treated as if it is always very visible and severely abnormal looking to non-autistic people. The way autism is treated in this book is otherwise very good, but not all autistic people scream and refuse to speak as kids, and not all autistic adults turn into obese couch potatoes without treatment. There is a spectrum of severity for autism, and the autistic characters in LaZebnik's book only portray a couple presentations of the overall spectrum of this disorder.

But, it is also not Claire LaZebnik's job to educate the world about autism, and for what it is, she did a nice job of providing a somewhat nuanced perspective on disability in our society and on autism in particular. And, while I wish more 'chick lit' authors wrote towards a mixed audience, not just toward whatever women are supposed to like reading, it is also not this one author's job to change the genre. Chick lit sells, and for the genre this one is not bad. There are no knitting patterns (which will disappoint my mom), but I'm sure some readers really enjoy the cocktail recipes at the end of the book, and for women who are more like the protagonists this will probably be a great read. ( )

Three L.A. Friends Share Their Lives, Loves, and Knitting: The fun illustration on the cover of this book hooked me into reading this book. The book turned out to deliver a much different story than I was expecting, and I ended up thoroughly engrossed in the story. Kathleen, Sari, and Lucy are three single friends living the fast life in Los Angeles. The three friends get together every Sunday morning for a kntiting circle, where they share their weekly happenings and love lives over knitting. The book turned out to be much more about the girls learning to find personal fulfillment and love than about either knitting or drinking, but that's okay!

A major sub-theme in the book is treatment for autism. In the story, Sari, whose older brother Charlie is autistic, works as a therapist at an autism clinic. Sari must deal with a bunch of conflicting emotions when she begins treating 4-year old Zack Smith, whose father Jason Smith went to high school with Sari and ran with a group of kids who made fun of Charlie and called him a "retard". The author has an autistic son of her own, and does a great job of weaving in the autism angle into the storyline.

Kathleen and Lucy are also very interesting characters. Kathleen is a triplet whose two identical sisters are child stars similar to the Olsen twins. As a triplet and a sibling of semi-famous celebrities, Kathleen is searching for her own identity. Finally, Lucy has a very interesting job doing animal research in a lab at UCLA, and has to deal with a lot of issues because her job involves killing rats for her research.

This book was a wonderful surprise for me, and I will definitely be on the lookout for more books written by Ms. LaZebnik.

This book was very enjoyable. My only complaint is that there could have been more knitting instruction, and it wasn't hard to figure out where the relationships were going. But still ,this is part of the reason I enjoyed it. This is my kind of book that takes me to other worlds and relaxes me from the days worries. The characters were well written and the book moved along. ( )