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The Shop on Blossom Street

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

Four lives knit together...

There's a little shop on Blossom Street in Seattle called A Good Yarn. You go there to buy knitting supplies and patterns — and now it's offering a knitting class. The first lesson: how to knit a baby blanket.

For owner Lydia Hoffman, the shop represents her dream of beginning a new life free from the cancer that has ravaged her twice. A life that offers a chance at love ... and maybe marriage.

Jacqueline Donovan is stuck in a marriage that has dwindled into an arrangement of separate rooms and separate lives. She disapproves of the woman married to her only son, but if she knits a baby blanket, she can at least pretend to like her pregnant daughter-in-law.

For Carol Girard, the baby blanket brings a message of hope as she and her husband make a final attempt at in vitro pregnancy.

And tense-looking Alix Townsend — that's Alix with an ""i"" — is learning to knit her blanket for her court-ordered community service project.

Brought together by an age-old craft, these four women make unexpected discoveries — about themselves and each other. Discoveries that lead to love, to friendship and acceptance, to laughter and dreams.

Performed by Linda Emond

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    • AudioFile Magazine
      Narrator Linda Emond portrays four women, from a Goth to a reluctant grandmother, who become unlikely friends in a knitting class. Emond develops a sense of urgency through timing and expert vocal nuance as reoccurring illness and miscarriage, divorce and betrayal rather predictably visit the characters. Clearly capturing each woman as she supports the others and searches for the answers to her own troubles, Emond outdoes herself in portraying counterculture proponent Alix, who joins the group to fulfill court-ordered community service. Although the novel is slow to start, the warmth of Emond's voice so embodies the tenacious characters as to deliver a worthwhile story of change and hope. G.D.W. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 26, 2004
      A Seattle knitting store brings together four very different women in this earnest tale about friendship and love. Lydia Hoffman, a two-time cancer survivor, opens the shop A Good Yarn as a symbol of the new life she plans to lead. She starts a weekly knitting class, hoping to improve business and make friends in the area. The initial class project is a baby blanket, and Macomber (Changing Habits
      ), a knitter herself who offers tips about the craft and pithy observations from knitting professionals throughout the novel, includes the knitting pattern at the start of the book. Well-heeled Jacqueline Donovan, who chooses to ignore her empty marriage, disguises her disdain for her pregnant daughter-in-law by knitting a baby blanket. Carol Girard joins the group as an affirmation of her hopes to finally have a successful in vitro pregnancy. Alix Townsend, a high school dropout with an absentee father and a mother incarcerated for forging checks, uses the class to satisfy a court-ordered community service sentence for a drug-possession conviction for which her roommate is really responsible. Unfortunately, Macomber doesn't get much below the surface of her characters, and, although they all have interesting back stories, the arc of each individual happy ending is too predictable. The only surprise involves Alix's hapless, overweight roommate, Laurel, and even this smacks of plot-driven manipulation. Macomber is an adept storyteller overall, however, and many will be entertained by this well-paced story about four women finding happiness and fulfillment through their growing friendships. Agent, Irene Goodman
      . (May)

      Forecast:
      The religious overtones of Macomber's novel may throw some readers, but the author should attract her usual sizeable readership and pick up some fans of Chiaverini's Elm Creek Quilts series. Author tour.

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  • English

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