{Yarn Along} Hayride Socks

I think this is my first skein of KnitPicks Stroll Hand-Painted. Or maybe not. I've used the Multi and the Memories and a few other yarns that came before Stroll.  This stuff is pretty and soft and making me smile. The colorway is Hayride. (I just ordered it a couple of weeks ago, but I don't see this one on their site anymore.)

I just finished reading Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty and I've absolutely got to share this one with my kids. It's wonderfully dark and spooky, interesting enough for adults but not too much for our younger family members. This would have been a perfect audio book for a family road trip. Serafina lives in the basement of the Biltmore with her father, who is in charge of the estate's electrical system. Born with missing bones and only four toes on each foot, she's always been different from everyone else. She roams the vast house freely, unseen by the wealthy family or their guests. When a man in a sinister black cloak appears and children begin disappearing,  Serafina must risk her own safety and secrets to stop him.

Center of Gravity by Laura McNeill is a domestic thriller told in first person point of view by five different characters. I had a hard time with that. Even though it said at the beginning of each chapter who was talking, I kept losing track and having to skim back to figure out whose head I was in. There's the abused wife at the center of the story, her stepson, her controlling husband....and then her lawyer and the court appointed psychologist get their own chapters. Near the end of the book, it all pulls together and had me holding my breath to see what would happen, but for the first few chapters I didn't care much at all about the characters.

For more pretty knitting projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times.

  Disclosure - The publishers provided me with ARCs.