Things I want My Daughters to Know/Elizabeth Noble

Thank You for All Things/Sandra Kring

The Year of Fog/Michelle Richmond

This was well-written and compelling. I couldn't put it down and read it in one weekend. I have never been one to skip ahead to see how a book turns out but I was highly tempted. Highly recommendable. The author uses scientific research on the power of human memory to layer the story with more depth yet the chapters are short and easy to read.

The Book of Bright Ideas/Sandra Kring

Finally some literary fiction. I've been reading a lot of light stuff that I just couldn't fall in love with. This is a great story that is well written and is filled with likable and relatable characters. It reminded me of Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, this time with a 9-year-old heroine.

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons/Lorna Landvik

I read this a few years ago, one of the earlier novels about a woman's book group.

Heirloom: Notes From An Accidental Tomato Farmer/Tim Stark

The Wednesday Sisters/Meg Waite Clayton

Certain Girls/Jennifer Weiner

Keeping Faith/Jodi Picoult

The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club/Gil Mc Neil

Another Mother's Life/Rowan Coleman

The Accidental Mother/Rowan Coleman

Deep in the Green/Anne Raver

Gardening essays

Love in the Present Tense/Catherine Ryan Hyde

The Time Travelers Life/Audrey Niffenegger

The Reading Group/Elizabeth Noble

Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me/Karen Karbo

Knit Two/Kate Jacobs

The sequel to the number-one New York Times bestseller The Friday Night Knitting Club, KNIT TWO returns to Walker and Daughter, the Manhattan knitting store founded by Georgia Walker and her young daughter, Dakota. Dakota is now an eighteen-year-old freshman at NYU, running the little yarn shop part-time with help from the members of the Friday Night Knitting Club.

Drawn together by the sense of family the club has created, the knitters rely on one another as they struggle with new challenges: for Catherine, finding love after divorce; for Darwin, the hope for a family; for Lucie, being both a single mom and a caregiver for her elderly mother; and for seventysomething Anita, a proposal of marriage from her sweetheart, Marty, that provokes the objections of her grown children.

As the club's projects-an afghan, baby booties, a wedding coat-are pieced together, so is their understanding of the patterns underlying the stresses and joys of being mother, wife, daughter, and friend. Because it isn't the difficulty of the garment that makes you a great knitter: it's the care and attention you bring to the craft-as well as how you adapt to surprises. --synopsis from barnesandnoble.com

Synopsis

Laurel Gray Hawthorne needs to make things pretty. Coming from a family with a literal skeleton in their closet, she's developed this talent all her life, whether helping her willful mother to smooth over the reality of her family's ugly past, or elevating humble scraps of unwanted fabric into nationally acclaimed art quilts.

Her sister Thalia, an impoverished "Actress" with a capital A, is her opposite, and prides herself in exposing the lurid truth lurking behind life's everyday niceties. And while Laurel's life was neatly on track, a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, and a lovely home in lovely suburban Victorianna, everything she holds dear is thrown into question the night she is visited by an apparition in her bedroom. The ghost appears to be her 14-year-old neighbor Molly Dufresne, and when Laurel follows this ghost , she finds the real Molly floating lifeless in her swimming pool. While the community writes the tragedy off as a suicide, Laurel can't. Reluctantly enlisting Thalia's aid, Laurel sets out on a life-altering investigation that triggers startling revelations about her own guarded past, the truth about her marriage, and the girl who stopped swimming. --synopsis from barnedandnoble.com

Julia's Chocolates/Cathy Lamb

From Publishers Weekly
The quirky debut romance from Lamb opens as Julia Bennett flees the Boston altar where her blueblood abuser fiancé, Robert Stanfield III, awaits her. She leaves her wedding gown in a North Dakota tree, and arrives in the tiny town of Golden, Oregon to take refuge with her beloved Aunt Lydia. As Julia slowly returns to a semblance of normalcy, Lydia's eccentric friends soon become Julia's near and dear as well: minister's wife Lara, psychic Caroline and abused wife Katie all have their own hidden pains, to which Julia can relate. Robert, who hit her and made her feel bad about her body, is never far from her thoughts, nor is her incapacitating "Dread Disease"-a feeling of panic she can't name. The dialogue is funny and bawdy: "Don't cry, love! You escaped a life's prison sentence with King Prick." Julia's struggles with people's interest in her chocolate-making, and in her person, make her a winningly flawed heroine, and there is well-deserved come-uppance for abusers of all types.
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This is definitely chick-lit in that it is whole-heartedly about female empowerment. However the domestic violence aspect makes it a little dark and graphic in places. Both traits I don't usually associate with chick-lit. Overall, I did find it and an entertaining read.