A Home by the Sea

August 22, 2011
Like a ripe peach, Skye’s second knitting-themed Summer Island contemporary (after The Knitting Diaries) easily separates into two juicy halves. First comes the Washington, D.C., courtship dance of hunky bomb squad specialist Noah McLeod and luscious food historian Grace Lindstrom, both virtually unraveled by earlier grievous losses. Then Grace’s adored grandfather, an old-fashioned country vet, suffers a bad fall and temporary loss of memory, and Grace returns to Summer Island, Ore., to help him. Her old friends Jilly and Caro ask her to join their new yarn shop and cafe venture, and when “lean and dangerous” Noah arrives, Grace’s suppressed libido “roars into angry overdrive.” Despite some hokey humor and unconvincing minor characters like Noah’s tritely conceived and jerkily expressed Scots papa and Slavic mama, Skye manages to keep her complicated plots clicking along like busy knitting needles, with promises of more to come.