Book Review: How to Knit a Love Song

I picked this book off my shelf not because I particularly wanted to read it at the moment - my knitting teacher had received it from someone and passed it along to me months ago - but because it was the smallest paperback I had and I was about to travel.
 
How to Knit a Love Song by Rachel Herron is your typical modern fiction romance.  The back of the book accurately sums up the plot and there’s no surprises.  That’s not a bad thing, and in fact can make for a nice little escape from the real world.

The heroine is an avid knitter who inherits a small cottage from a knitting guru.  Herron does an excellent job of weaving knitting into the story.  It plays an important role as the heroine’s refuge from her fears, serves as an analogy for life throughout the novel, and offers some very realistic everyday fun such as when the heroine hugs the hero with small needles in her pocket and accidentally stabs him.

The heroine’s new cottage is near the California coast, just south of San Francisco.  - I appreciated the setting being an area I’ve seen and could easily picture. -  And the cottage comes with one very big problem; it’s surrounded by a large sheep ranch that also belonged to the knitting guru and has been passed down to her nephew.  He’s a bit disgruntled about not getting everything, as you can imagine. 

The city-slicker knitter on a sheep farm line provides for plenty of situational humor, and the ranch setting, much like in Pieces of Sky, provides plenty of opportunity for dreamy descriptions of the rancher’s physique.

Personally, I prefer the “love making” style in Pride and Prejudice to the “his hand started drifting down, toward the center of her heat, where she throbbed” type stuff.  And that’s one of the cleaner examples from the book.  But, this is modern romantic fiction, and it is what it is.
It’s a cute book, and if you’re looking for an easy read that won’t distract you from daily life when you’re not in the book, then this book’s for you.  It also has a pattern in the back for the sweater the heroine’s knitting throughout the book.  That’s pretty neat.