Unraveled, Week 17/2026

It's Wednesday again -- and it's a wet one here. I'm not sure if I'll be able to run this morning (I dislike running in the rain, but I'll do it if it's not too heavy), but for sure I'll be walking with Ruthie later and making good use of my raincoat.

This Unraveled Wednesday finds me at a pretty exciting place in my sweater WIP: the ribbing at the bottom of the body!

Now, don't get too excited -- it's still fingering weight yarn that's now being knit in ribbing on a US 2.5/3 mm needle, so it's not like this is particularly quick knitting. But at least the body is nearly done, and though I know many people hate knitting sleeves, I don't mind them as much because they're smaller in circumference and get even smaller as the decreases are worked.

My reading has been keeping up a good pace thanks to audiobooks -- I'm listening to more this year than I ever have before! Here are the four books I finished this week:

Sweet Pea by Kit de Waal

4 stars

Paulette believes she's about to have everything she wants -- a life and family with the man she loves -- when that man is killed in a car crash. What's more, she finds out that he was married with children. Grieving for the love and imagined future she lost, she takes up with the dead lover's friend and ends up having a child with him. Though she doesn't love her son's father, motherhood transforms her, and she is determined to give her son the best life possible. In a twist of fate, she meets the man who was driving the car that killed her lover. When she discovers that he is raising his grandson (but doing a poor job of it because of his own struggles related to the accident), she steps in to help. In the years that follow, these two broken families' lives are intertwined, with the two boys, Bird and Nellie, growing up together and Paulette serving as a surrogate mother of sorts to Nellie. As in any family, of course, there are challenges and struggles. Both boys go through periods of rebellion, and Bird increasing spends time with his father and his new family, leaving Paulette alone. Paulette finds she still isn't over her dead love and struggles to forgive Nellie's grandfather, even as she pities him. And through it all she regularly finds herself alone, missing the grandmother who raised her in St. Kitts and grieving the life she thought she'd have. But Paulette eventually realizes that she's not truly alone; through her love and care, she has created her own family, strange though it may be. This is a beautiful novel about the power of found family, of forgiveness, and of the power of love. Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published November 3, 2026.

Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley

3 stars

As was the case with Boulley's two previous novels, this one draws attention to an important issue in the Indigenous community. This time, it's the treatment (or mistreatment) of Indigenous children in the foster care system and the disregard of the Indian Child Welfare Act. Lucy, the main character, ended up in the system after her mother left when she was an infant and her father died when she was a young teen. Though many people suspected she was at least partly Indigenous, her father had always denied it. After a couple of troubling foster placements, she's finally aged out of the system -- but she's not completely free of it because she's being followed because of something that happened at one of them (which we don't find out about until very close to the end of the book). A lawyer and his friend Daunis (a character from Boulley's debut) want to help her and reveal to her that her mother was in fact Indigenous, but she isn't ready to trust them. I thought the attention paid to ICWA and the foster care system were worthwhile, but I found the plot to be a bit unbelievable. I still think Firekeeper's Daughter is Boulley's best work.

Eddie Winston Is Looking for Love by Marianne Cronin

4 stars
I was delighted to find this on Libby with no wait after hearing about it on last week's episode of the What Should I Read Next podcast. Eddie Winston is 90 years old and has never been kissed. He keeps busy by working in a charity shop, and his special talent is sorting through donations and finding items that he knows the donors will regret giving away and come back for. That's what happens when Bella, a 20-something woman grieving the death of her boyfriend, drops off a bag of his things; Eddie knows she'll be back for his shoes and notebook. The two of them begin having lunch together in the park and soon form a friendship, and when Bella learns about Eddie's failed romantic history, she decides she has to help him. But as she helps him set up an online dating profile and coaches him, she also learns that he fell in love many years ago with a married woman. Slowly that story is revealed and Eddie and Bella help each other to move on. This is a sweet, heartfelt book about grief, lost love, and found family, and it's lovely on audio with three British narrators.

The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin

4 stars

I enjoyed Eddie so much that I immediately borrowed Cronin's debut novel. Lenni is 17 years old and Margot is 83 when they meet in an Edinburgh hospital art therapy room, both of them facing terminal illnesses. They realize that together they have lived 100 years and set out to create 100 works of art, each one commemorating their favorite memory from each year of their lives. As they tell their stories to each other, we learn about their early years, their heartbreaks, and their most precious memories. Both of them are fairly alone in the world as they face death and they become each other's family. While it seems like this would be a sad novel, and in many ways it is, it's also inspiring and touching to see how a teenager and octogenarian support each other and provide the love they both need.

I'm still working my way through two long books and am getting caught up on some podcasts. What are you making and reading this week?