"Knit the Season" by Kate Jacobs

($24.95, hardcover, Putnam, 260 pages)

BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

For fans of "The Friday Night Knitting Club," author Kate Jacobs delivers another cozy installment of the lives of women associated with the Walker and Daughter knitting store in Manhattan. "Knit the Season" is the third novel in a series about a diverse group of Manhattan women who all happen to knit.

In The New York Times best-seller "The Friday Night Knitting Club," we first met single mother Georgia Walker and her young daughter Dakota. They knit a close group of friends through a knitting club that was more about relationships than yarn. Dakota's father came back into the picture, upsetting their lives for the better, but Georgia is stricken with cancer and dies, leaving Dakota and her dad to forage a new life together surrounded by the club.

In "Knit Two," the club members get to spin their own stories, with a focus on Georgia's older friend Anita as well as more scenes with the day-to-day lives of other club members as they deal with parenthood, work and family. Georgia remains a presence through memories. In "Knit the Season," she is there as well, in other characters' memories of her as well as italicized vignettes of her own experiences. The memories of Georgia are welcome threads in the story, but at times seem out of place, inserted to remind the readers that this is still Georgia's world, even if she's no longer in it. But that could be the point of the Georgia-peppered chapters -- that when someone dies, their presence remains.

"Knit the Season" covers the holidays of Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year's with festivities and happily satisfying encounters between characters.

The story takes a little while to get going. Readers know that Dakota will decide to go to Scotland for Christmas with Gran and the rest of her family, but must read through several conversations in which Dakota says she's choosing an internship that she hasn't even received yet over family time because she wants to gain an edge on her culinary career. Work being dominant is a lesson she learned from her father James, who has since changed his mind. But Dakota isn't comfortable with change -- changes to her past view of her mother, changes in other people's lives, or changes to her idea of her own future.

Once the story and holidays are under way, the novel is a satisfying, comforting tale of familiar characters. It's another window into their realistic lives, both in activities and thoughts about life. There is enough of a range of perspectives to appeal to an array of readers.

Some of the club members featured more prominently in the first two books are left on the fringe in "Knit the Season," like Darwin, KC and Lucie. Enough details about their current lives are revealed to keep fans updated, but they are simply peripheral characters in this book. Peri is featured a little more, but in the context of Dakota's -- and the knitting shop's -- future. "Knit the Season" is really Dakota's book. Will Dakota choose work or family? Or both? How will Dakota react to her dad dating someone? Will Dakota keep pressuring herself to make a future career come to fruition already when she's barely an adult? How will Dakota adjust to change?

The off-lead story is the one started in "Knit Two," of Anita and her fiance Marty, Anita's rekindled relationship with her long lost sister in Italy, and how that Italy trip led to Catherine's own love story. This third Knitting Club novel also paints a more pleasant picture of Catherine, a character who has grown into herself as each book progressed.

Jacobs ends this novel with a change that could easily launch the next book in the series, with an occasional character becoming an integral one. The author leaves enough story threads open for several more books. "Knit the Season" is the kind of holiday read you can settle into and revisit with old friends until the next novel comes along. Or movie. A "The Friday Night Knitting Club" film is in the works.