Unraveled, Week 4/2024

Greetings from a very gloomy Wednesday morning here in Pittsburgh. The good news is that we finally got above freezing after a stretch of frigid weather. The bad news is that rain is in the forecast for the foreseeable future, so there's not much sun to be seen.

It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to link up with Kat and the Unravelers and give you an update on my making and reading. I've decided that after my success with the sweater, I should give the same sort of attention to my other WIPs from 2023, so I pulled out this shawl:

This is my Mas Vida shawl, which I cast on way back in June and thought I would whip up in no time. I got a lot of it knit when I was in Nashville in July and then it just sat. Last night I pulled it out again, added a few repeats, and finally got to the point where I will stop increasing and start decreasing. I'm using some really lovely yarn (a merino/cashmere/silk from Fibernymph Dye Works) that will be a delight to have around my neck, so I think I have sufficient motivation to get this done soon.

I've also got a new spin going, the July 2023 Southern Cross Fibre club shipment. It's called Bloom and is on a decadent 70% superfine Merino/30% mulberry silk base. I've decided to do a chain-ply, so I split the fiber into four narrow strips that I'm spinning in succession. The lack of light won't cooperate to allow me to share a decent photo of the singles, but here is the fiber:

In keeping with last year's trend of a high percentage of audiobooks, I've finished two in the last week.

The first of these is Family Family, which was just published yesterday. If there's an overarching theme of this book, it's that families come in so many different forms and can be created in so many different ways, and no one form or one way is inherently the "right" way. There are so many assumptions about adoption, many of them involving implied trauma, and this book sets out to show that's not always the case.

The story is told in alternating timelines, one in near-present day and one one in the main character's past, slowly working toward the present. India Allwood is an a teenager aspiring to life as a professional actress when she finds herself pregnant, ultimately deciding that placing her child for adoption will allow someone else's dreams of being a parent come true. In the present, she has just found herself in the middle of a controversy over comments she has make about her most recent role, in which she's a mother who was so traumatized by giving up a child for adoption that she's become addicted to drugs. As we learn more about India's past, we learn more about why she signed on for the role in the first place, why she was dissatisfied with the message it sent, and how complicated families can be -- whether they're biological or adoptive. I gave it 4 stars.

I received an audio ARC of this book from MacMillan Audio/Henry Holt & Company and NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Brotherless Night was a recommendation from Kat during the Read With Us discussion of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Like Seven Moons, it takes place during the long civil war in Sri Lanka, though this novel is much less experimental in its storytelling. It is told by Sashi, a teenager aspiring to become a doctor when the story opens, and follows her through the next decade or so. She tells us this story from later in life as though it were a memoir, and we learn about the tragedies and struggles to befall her Tamil family, including her four brothers. It is a heartbreaking story and a reminder that war is a tragedy on all sides, with blame and atrocities to be found everywhere. I appreciated the audio in helping me with pronunciations, but I also found it a little tricky to keep track of all the characters, and the narrator also had a somewhat strange habit of phrasing things such that she seemed to put a period in the middle of sentences that tripped me up a bit. But overall, I found it to be a really powerful and impactful read. I gave it 4 stars.

I am still working my way through The Poisonwood Bible, though I'm more than halfway through now, and I've just started another audiobook, Monsters.

What are you making and reading this week?