First Frost - Sarah Addison Allen

Title: First Frost (Waverley Family #2)
Author: Sarah Addison Allen
Genre: Chick-lit
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 305
Date read: December, 2018

It's October in Bascom, North Carolina, and autumn will not go quietly. As temperatures drop and leaves begin to turn, the Waverley women are made restless by the whims of their mischievous apple tree... and all the magic that swirls around it. But this year, first frost has much more in store.

Claire Waverley has started a successful new venture, Waverley’s Candies. Though her handcrafted confections — rose to recall lost love, lavender to promote happiness and lemon verbena to soothe throats and minds — are singularly effective, the business of selling them is costing her the everyday joys of her family, and her belief in her own precious gifts.

Sydney Waverley, too, is losing her balance. With each passing day she longs more for a baby — a namesake for her wonderful Henry. Yet the longer she tries, the more her desire becomes an unquenchable thirst, stealing the pleasure out of the life she already has.

Sydney’s daughter, Bay, has lost her heart to the boy she knows it belongs to.. if only he could see it, too. But how can he, when he is so far outside her grasp that he appears to her as little more than a puff of smoke?

When a mysterious stranger shows up and challenges the very heart of their family, each of them must make choices they have never confronted before. And through it all, the Waverley sisters must search for a way to hold their family together through their troublesome season of change, waiting for that extraordinary event that is First Frost.


The sequel to "Garden Spells" and almost as good! I really enjoyed that Bay got to play a bigger part in this one, and that Clare and Sydney were finally learning how to be sisters. It's a nice comfort read, where the characters are a lot more important than the plot, as I enjoyed spending time with all the Waverleys (both real and adopted) again.

A Stash of One's Own - Clara Parkes

Title: A Stash of One's Own
Author: Various - edited by Clara Parkes
Genre: Essays
Rating: 4/5
# pages: 192
Date read: December 2018

This addictive-to-read anthology celebrates yarn—specifically, the knitter’s reputation for acquiring it in large quantities and storing it away in what’s lovingly referred to as a “stash.”

The stories in A Stash of One’s Own represent and provide validation for knitters’ wildly varying perspectives on yarn, from holding zero stash, to stash-busting, to stockpiling masses of it—and even including it in estate plans. These tales are for all fiber artists, spinners, dyers, crafters, crocheters, sheep farmers, shop owners, beginning knitters to yarn experts, and everyone who has ever loved a skein too hard to let it go.

A charming collection on essays about living with yarn in all its permutations. As always with anthologies, there were some essays I connected with more closely than others (and even some - like the one by Rachael Herron - which made me ugly-cry), but as a knitter (and stasher!) myself, I could relate to all of them in one way or another, and it was interesting to see how differently people stash! I'm definitely more like Stephanie Pearl-McPhee than Amy Herzog. There were a few I skimmed, and some I probably won't reread on subsequent read-throughs, but all in all it was definitely a comfort read and an anthology I would recommend to other knitters.