Review: The Knitting Fairy, by Jaime Marsman

The Knitting FairyThe Knitting Fairy, by Jaime Marsman (Shade Tree Publishing, 2012)

Librarian’s Assistant Molly Stevenson has her life planned out. In fact, The Plan is stuck to her fridge where she can review it regularly. She loves her job, and if she can survive until her abrasive boss retires, she’ll inherit the position.

Until a woman who looks just like Mother Goose comes into the library with a long-overdue book. And then Molly gets fired. And then Mother Goose (whose real name is Carolyn) finds her and offers her a  job in a knitting store.

A knitting store? Molly had no idea such things existed or could turn a profit. As Carolyn would say, she’s been “denying her inner knitter.”

On impulse, Molly turns her back on The Plan and takes the job. And discovers she loves to knit. (Learning is an understandable condition of employment.)

The Knitting Fairy is a light-hearted mystery that knitters are sure to love. It’s not a murder mystery, but Carolyn’s store, Crabapple Yarns, has been receiving threatening calls. And shortly after Molly starts work there, people’s knitting projects begin getting mysterious “help”. Customers joke about a knitting fairy, but who’s behind this? When the “help” changes to sabotage, it has to be stopped. But how?

The story is told in first person, and Molly makes a cheerful and funny narrator. Suspects abound, and I completely missed the clues about the Knitting Fairy’s identity. How the culprit gets access to the knitters’ projects doesn’t really work for me, but it’s a minor point. And the book has a few more copyediting errors than average. I read the Kindle version, but it’s also available in print.

The Knitting Fairy is book 1 in the Crabapple Yarns series, so I hope to see book 2 in the future. Jaime Marsman is a knitwear designer as well as a novelist. Visit her website to learn more about the book and author (scroll down the page to see the options) or stop by the Yarns From Crabapple Yarns blog to see what the novel’s characters have to say. You can also find Jaime Marsman on Facebook.

[Review copy from my personal library.]

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