Sweater Quest Book Review by ChristineMM

Title: Sweater Quest: My Year of Knitting Dangerously
Author: Adrienne Martini
Publication: Free Press March 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1416597643
Full Retail Price: $15.00

My Star Rating: 4 Stars out of 5 = I Like It

Summary Statement: A Light Fast Read (but a Bit Disappointing)





I first heard of this book last year when the author was interviewed on a knitting podcast (Cast-On with Brenda Dayne) and I decided back then that I wanted to read it.

This book is about Adrienne Martini’s year long project to knit a difficult Fair Isle sweater. The sweater pattern book is out of print so just getting your hands on a copy is a daunting and expensive task. The designer of the sweater pattern is Alice Starmore, and without getting too much into it, there is a big story to explain why the books and the yarns that Starmore created with her name as the brand name are no longer available (unless you can find them secondhand). Starmore’s patterns are considered complicated to knit. I was surprised that Martini didn’t seem to respect Alice Starmore much. Over and over we are told what bugs her about Starmore and it seemed to me she was closed-minded and had made up her mind early on to hate Starmore.

I thought the book would be more about the process of knitting this challenging sweater. I thought it would have funny stories or struggles to try to get the technique down, like a knitting memoir of sorts. Instead the book wound up being hardly anything about the knitting of the sweater. After not mentioning it for a while the author says nonchalantly that the technique was not hard to master after all (cue the sound of the last of the air being let out of a balloon), how disappointing. Give us more! I wanted to root for her knitting journey but apparently there was not much to cheer for as it wasn’t so hard after all! And then the question is do we need to have a book centered on it?

The book is more about related nonfiction knitting topics. Martini tells about the history of Fair Isle knitting and about meeting various current popular knitters in the knitting blogosphere (i.e. The Yarn Harlot and one of the Mason Dixon Knitting authors).

On the one hand I found this entertaining light reading but on the other, I was let down in the end by this book as I hoped for more. If you read books by the Yarn Harlot I don’t think this measures up to that. Still it was light easy reading perfect for before bed reading. It does remind me of the type of writing I can (and do) read for free on knitting blogs which either makes me think now that some bloggers deserve to have a book published or leaves me asking if there was really enough material here to justify publishing as a book. It reads like a combination of a knitting blog post or Ravelry forum post crossed with a magazine article on knitting. It has a bit more of an air of the writing of a freelance reporter but not as deep or serious as an investigative journalist.

I think the issue for me is that when we are being told about a topic it was so often stuff I already knew (and I’ve not even been knitting for two years). I’ve read the Yarn Harlot’s books, I don’t need them quoted or referenced so often. Tell me something I don’t know, educate me on some obscure topic that is not common knowledge. I guess I was hoping for writing something more like the food memoir LIBATION A BITTER ALCHEMY (which is deeper and more thorough with information the reader would not already know with excellent writing that almost seduces the reader).

If you want some light reading about knitting read this for fun, you’ll enjoy this. If you can’t get your hands on enough books about knitting you’ll love this.
















Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book from the Amazon Vine program for publication on the Amazon.com site. I also purchased a copy of this book. I did not get paid to write this review or to post the review on my blog. For my blog's full disclosure statement see the link at the top of my blog's sidebar.