How to Knit a Wild Bikini

by Christie Ridgway and Thérèse Plummer

Book Overview

USA Today bestselling author Christie Ridgway stitches together the perfect beach read with the first novel in the Malibu and Ewe series.

Malibu & Ewe has become the knitting hotspot, the perfect place for L.A.'s hip, young crowd to enjoy colorful yarn and intimate conversation in a beach side setting. Just ask chef Nikki Carmichael. It could be the softest place for her to land if her new job falls through.

With...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425221938
• ISBN13: 9780425221938
• Release Date: June 2008
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.3" x 6.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

How to Knit a Wild Bikini

Nikki Carmichael is lonely but not truly realizing it. Not knowing what exactly she is looking for, she knows it is time for a life change. Her knee can no longer handle her being a chef in a restaurant. The offer of a personal chef position with her friend's former boss is a nice way to keep herself going until she can find a more permanent position or decide where she is going in her life. Jay Buchanan lives his life as a young Hugh Hefner. He owns a men's magazine and writes articles on women. He has taken a year off women. A year that is tested the moment he meets his new personal chef. How to Knit a Wild Bikini is a darling and perky novel of rebirth and finding oneself when you do not realize you are lost. I enjoyed the background characters who were all well-developed and I hope to see more of them in the future. How to Knit a Wild Bikini is a cup of tea to sit down and enjoy on a Saturday afternoon or after a rough day of work. A lovely escape. Emma Reviewed for Joyfully Reviewed

LOVED this story

I absolutely loved this story! I just finished it last night and I'm now downloading the second in the series (Unravel Me) onto my Kindle so I can keep going with these great characters. Ms. Ridgway creates excellent characters with unique voices and blends the secondary plotlines in perfectly. I'm always thrilled to discover a new author, especially one that has a backlist!

I don't think Jay was a tool

I had purchased How to Knit a Wild Bikini before I read the reviews. What I saw multiple times was a mean description of the hero. Since I had already paid for the book I decided what the hell I'll read it anyway. Let's just say I did not expect much. The hero far exceded my low expectations. Jay Buchanon starts out as one of those rich jerks who we all know exists. He promises the male readers of the successful magazine he owns that he will stay away from women until he finds 'The One'. Nikki Carmichael is a personal chef with a lot of emotional baggage. This witch - an endearment, there is no bipitty bopitty boo in this story - with one blue eye and one green eye will do anything to continue being Jay's stay-at-home chef. Including convince him that she is a lesbian and others that she is his girlfriend. The side plots are interesting but are better because they are terse (even possibly suck). This book was able to bring me back to reality a bit. The following is what it opened my eyes to - even if temporarily: -Sometimes two people being so blissfully wrapped up in each other means they neglect their friends and family. -Even jerks fall in love. Yes, Jay was sometimes crude and sex-obsessed but most guys are. -We can't always blame negative personality traits on genetics. Yea your dad may have been distant but you can be a loner because it has suited you well in the past. -More than grandparents become young through their relationships. Nikki is 28 to Jay's 32 and yet it was terribly entertaining to see them act like teenagers. Well, they did have often raunchy sex uncommon in high school but there was that puppy-like love. So those are the things I liked. What I did not like was: - Jay seemed to lose some of his charming cockiness. At the end he even seemed a bit mushy. - I felt like I had accidentally skipped a huge chunck of all three sideplots. None of them were majorly important but if there had been more meat (figuratively) to the stories, it may have reached that unspoken requirement of most romance novels to be 350 + pages. Though maybe that feeling of being left behind was intentional. It was what really hit home the idea of friends and families being neglected. I probably lost a lot of readers by now but if your still reading then I want to say this was a good book. I liked it and it wasn't as cliche as I was dreading.

A Beach Read !

I almost did not read this book because of all the reviews - but it was funny and had some interesting twists and turns. The comments about the knitting not being in the story - it was a meeting place for most of the characters. This story was about Nikki who had a bum knee and needed a personaly chef job - she landed one with Hef Jr aka Jay editor of men's magazine. Jay gets Nikki to pretend to be his girlfriend and she pretends to be gay. The cast of characters will continue - check out her next book Unravel Me due out Nov 4, 2008.

Hectic, but fun

Nikki is a chef whose days in the restaurant business are numbered---her bum knee makes it impossible for her to endure the grueling hours on her feet any longer. She lands an opportunity with Jay Buchanan, wealthy playboy. The problem is, he's sworn off women and wants a lesbian personal chef to make sure he won't be tempted to stray from that resolution. Nikki is about to lose her one and only job nibble when, in order to make the neighbor think that he has a new girlfriend, Jay kisses her. She uses the opportunity to introduce herself as his chef and, once the neighbor's gone, to pretend to be the lesbian he was hoping to hire. I gather there will be follow-on books in the 'Malibu & Ewe' series (that's the name of a central yarn shop), and some of the relationships in this book were used as set-up for later books rather than pay-off in this one. Unfortunately this resulted in some relationships feeling hurried and shallow; there was too much to fit into this one volume. That said, Christie Ridgway has a knack for uproarious (often scandalous) dialogue and pours plenty of it into How to Knit a Wild Bikini. As Nikki pretends to be a lesbian and Jay pretends to believe her, they have some of the best and most fun lines in the book. While the side plots did a good job of working certain parallels and complicating the main plot, there were too many side plots and a few too many convenient coincidences. It gave things a rushed and orchestrated feel. Ordinarily that would have bothered me more, but the hilarious dialogue, fun chemistry between the main characters, and so on made up for it. I heartily enjoyed the story, and couldn't put it down once I started!