Jennifer Chiaverini, New Year’s Quilt

New Year's Quilt

Jennifer Chiaverini

Simon & Schuster, Nov 2007, $19.95

ISBN: 9781416547556

Over Christmas elderly couple Sylvia Compson and Andrew Cooper marry in front of friends at the Elm Creek Manor. His two children and grandchildren do not attend because they were to busy to spend the holidays with him though they did not know about the wedding. Andrew believes they did not come because his son Bob and his daughter Amy objected to his engagement to Sylvia. Their mom died several years ago from cancer. The couple decides to drive from Pennsylvania, stop in New York, and finally visit Amy, her spouse and their three children in Connecticut where they will inform her that they married.

Sylvia is working on a special quilt, a New Year's Reflection that she plans to give Amy. She hopes her spouse and his daughter reconcile as she failed to with her older sister Claudia when she left Elm Creek angrily fifty years ago. Now it is too late as Claudia is dead. She prays that Amy is smarter than she was. On the journey Sylvia continues to reflect on her past and her mistakes knowing New York is a brief interlude with Hartford being either a battlefield or a reconciliation.

The heroine is an interesting character who uses lessons learned from mistakes she made in life to reach out to the adult daughter of her new husband. Thus answers are provided to most of the threads from the previous tales. Although the anticipated antagonism from his daughter is minor and anticlimactic, fans of the Elm Creek Quilt series will appreciate the latest quilt patches (past and present).

Harriet Klausner