The Cross-Country Quilters by Jennifer Chiaverini

Series: #3 in the Elm Creek Quilts series
Genre: Fiction
Publication Date: 2001
Pages: 367
Challenges: TBR 2009 Challenge #7, Support Your Local Library Challenge #12

This was a perfect book for me to read this week. I had surgery yesterday to fix a herniated disk in my back. Surgery went well and I’ve got some recovery time ahead of me, but it’s nice to put several months of chronic pain behind me. The last thing I needed to be reading this week was something that was a downer or took a lot of thought and concentration. This book was perfect.

The Elm Creek Quilts series is about a group of women who run a quilting workshop center in an old family home in Pennsylvania. This book actually focuses more on visitors to the Manor than the folks who run it. The story centers on five women who meet at one of the week long ‘Quilt Camps’ at Elm Creek Manor. They have all come from varied backgrounds for very different reasons. By the end of the week they have become friends and plan to make a challenge quilt. Before returning for another quilt camp the next year, each woman agrees to make a block for a quilt. The challenge is that they are not to start their quilt block before facing up to a personal challenge in their lives.

These books are pretty light and predictable. They’re not great literature, but they’re comfort reads for me. They always seem to bring together a group of women with disparate personalities who have quilting in common. I enjoy learning something about quilting even though I’m not a quilter at all. I know that by the end of the book everything will have worked out for the best. For this week, it was just the kind of book I needed. I think it was good to take the series away from Elm Creek Manor for a bit, but I’m hoping that Sylvia and the regulars are back in the next book in the series.