Maybelle in Stitches #bookreview @Litfuse

About Quilts of Love: Quilts tell stories of love and loss, hope and faith, tradition and new beginnings. The Quilts of Love series focuses on the women who quilted all of these things into their family histories. A new book releases each month and features contemporary and historical romances as well as women’s fiction and the occasional light mystery. You will be drawn into the endearing characters of this series and be touched by their stories.

 

About the book: Maybelle Kazinzki can’t sew. She was after all, the only girl in the seventh grade Home Economics class to sew the zipper in the neck hole of the A-Line dress they were supposed to make. But when she finds an unfinished quilt in the attic of her mother’s house she gets the crazy idea to finish it—somehow, come heck or high water. She thinks it will help fill the lonely nights while her husband, Holden, is serving overseas during World War II.

Her recently departed mother’s quilt is made from scraps of material Maybelle traces back to her mother’s childhood, her grandmother’s childhood and her own childhood. She tries to add one of Holden’s stripes to it but the sewing is not going well and neither is her life. After receiving some harsh news, Maybelle’s faith falters and she puts the quilt away and stops trusting God. But God is faithful—no matter what. And it’ll take a group of neighborhood women armed with quilting needles to help Maybelle believe that.

Learn more about this book and the series at the Quilts of Love website.

About the Author: Joyce Magnin is the author of the Bright’s Pond novels, including the award-winningThe Prayers of Agnes Sparrow. A member of the Greater Philadelphia Christian Writers Fellowship, Joyce is a frequent workshop leader and the organizer of the StoryCrafters fiction group. She lives near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

 

Learn more about Joyce at: http://joycemagnin.blogspot.com

 

 

 

 

 

My thoughts:  I’m always up for a good book about quilts, but Maybelle in Stitches is so much more!  Here we not only learn about a quilt made up of pieces of everyone involved and their loved ones( a crazy quilt) but we also learn that those quilts have a name.  It’s Hope.  Hope for the future, hope for the present, and that everything will end up all right in the end.  We meet Maybelle and follow her through some of the darkest days of her life.  Her husband of only a short time is off in the war and she doesn’t know if he’ll make it back alive.  And then he goes MIA.  Will he come home to her?  And of course her mother dies while her husband is off.  I loved this book and enjoyed the view of the the women along the Home Front during WWII.