Review: Confessions from the Quilting Circle

 Confessions from the Quilting Circle

About the Book:

When Lark Ashwood’s beloved grandmother dies, she and her sisters discover an unfinished quilt. Finishing it could be the reason Lark’s been looking for to stop running from the past, but is she ever going to be brave enough to share her biggest secret with the people she ought to be closest to?

Hannah can’t believe she’s back in Bear Creek, the tiny town she sacrificed everything to escape from. The plan? Help her sisters renovate her grandmother’s house and leave as fast as humanly possible. Until she comes face-to-face with a man from her past. But getting close to him again might mean confessing what really drove her away...

Stay-at-home mom Avery has built a perfect life, but at a cost. She’ll need all her family around her, and all her strength, to decide if the price of perfection is one she can afford to keep paying.

This summer, the Ashwood women must lean on each other like never before, if they are to stitch their family back together, one truth at a time...

My Comments:

There was a lot to like in this book, which is why I stayed up to 1:00 a.m. on a work  night reading it.  Three sisters and their mother are working together to close out their grandmother/mother's estate. While cleaning out the house they find fabric for a quilt that Grandma never got around to making and through journals found with the fabric, learn about women in their family's past, including Grandma.  Each of the four women was working with a different piece of fabric and of course they all end up with the one that they really needed to see, the ancestress who had a story that for whatever reason, came close to hers.  

Lark and Hannah both left town with secrets, and Avery has now acquired one.  As they sit and sew and as they live their lives that summer, they share their secrets and gain the strength to move beyond them.  Unfortunately to me, it seemed there were just too many secrets that were just too serious to believe they all belonged to one family.  Also the book had two romantic subplots and except for the fact that the men had different names and one man had a child and the other didn't, I really couldn't tell them apart.  Either of the romance subplots was believable on its own, but having two so similar just didn't ring true to me.

 

One thing I liked about the book was that the girls' mother was a strong secondary character.  While the sisters were in their 30's, their mom was about my age and she was a doer, like me.  Like me she wanted to be closer to her grown kids but didn't quite know how to reach out.  Like I hope I'd be, she was there for her girls when the chips were down and she knew they needed her. 

 

The book has a couple of bedroom scenes--too much to make it a "clean" romance but nothing anywhere near an instruction manual.  

 

I'd like to thank the publisher for making a review copy available via NetGalley.  Grade: B