Friday, September 30, 2011

What I Read - Waking Up in the Land of Glitter

Waking Up in the Land of Glitter gets an endorsement from me just for the very fact that one of the characters finds her salvation through crochet, but it's a pretty good book anyway.  Basically, the plot follows three ladies through the disasters of their lives from August to December: Star, a would-be artist who has six months to get her life on track and sell 347 pounds of glass glitter, Ofie, who dedicates her life to crafts of all kinds even though she has no talent, and Chloe, an up-and-coming TV personality who uses crafts as her springboard, yet hates the very thing that is her claim to fame.  The three come together, along with Benecio, a high school boy with an interest in designing handbags, as part of a craft group thrown together by Star, with the sole purpose of creating the centerpieces for the upcoming Craft Olympics.
When everything was going badly, I couldn't put the book down, eager to see how things would work out, or if they even would.  And of course they do, which is slightly to the book's detriment.  It isn't that I didn't want to see the ladies succeed and come out happy, but everything wrapped up just a little too nicely.  *Spoilers Ahead* Star finally has an art show, and of course everything sells, plus she finally gets the love of her life and doesn't even have to try and make a long distance relationship work.  Ofie discovers she's a natural at crochet, and of course she wins the speed crochet tournament at the Craft Olympics and ends up with all kinds of endorsements and a book deal.  Chloe not only discovers true love, but, despite being completely disgraced on her own news show, gets an endorsement from a Rachel Ray-alike and a potential TV show.  Even Benecio gets endorsements and guest spots, and his dad, a former workaholic, dedicates the rest of his time to his son.
And there's one thing that keeps niggling at me: at various points in the book, Ofie's mother-in-law tells her to take up crochet and offers to teach her, yet Ofie turns her down.  But later, she has Benecio teach her (for no mentioned reason), without the book ever addressing that fact.  The mother-in-law doesn't even bring it up.  Not to mention the fact that Ofie claims to only know one stitch, double crochet.  Wouldn't she have started with single crochet?
So yeah, while I enjoyed reading this book, the too-neat ending keeps me from really loving it.  Still, it is very nice to have a book where crochet plays a good-sized part of the story without it being a mystery.

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