The Fabulous Fantoras

Quite often you hear a little whisper about a book in blogland and you know you have to read it and so it has been this week with The Fabulous Fantoras Book 1 Family Files by Adele Geras published in 1988. Once I heard it featured knitting I had to read it and at warp speed managed to acquire this lovely little 1998 US edition.
Narrated by the cat Ozzy, The Fantoras are the ultimate in eccentric and unusually gifted families that have so much appeal for young readers and how I would love to have been reading this as a child.
Try as you may of course you can't manage it as a grown up, the moment has long gone.But still I loved this one, I was chuckling all the way through.How about this for the name of the MD of Transylvania Mystery Tours Inc, U.Scrimior - Edoff...get it?
Favourite character has to be Grandmother Filomena who as well as enjoying a daily work out on her trampoline, knits "the threads of the past into the fabric of the future", from her knitting she can predict what will happen.
It's priceless as is Filomena's wisdom
"wouldn't it be wonderful if life were like a piece of knitting? Then you could go back and undo the bits you didn't like, correct your mistakes, knit up your life again into a better pattern...how lovely it would be to pull a thread and unravel Time, unpick all the days when you were unhappy, and knit them up again into better days"
And if that won't quite work there is a lovely pattern to knit your own Filomena Dream Cushion with a colour chart to guide you as you conjure up your choice of dream.These sound wonderful so the pattern will feature here on Crafty Saturday by kind permission of Adele Geras.
More soon on another children's book by Adele, Apricots at Midnight, this one about a patchwork quilt.