lakeside is a supper club that is handed down through the generations. The story of the women who ran it. ( )

Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she’s been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel’s grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant, skipping Florence, it created a rift between mother and daughter that never quite healed.

Ned is also an heir—to a chain of home-style diners—and while he doesn't have a head for business, he knows his family's chain could provide a better future than his wife's fading restaurant. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Ned and Mariel lose almost everything they hold dear, and the hard-won victories of each family hang in the balance. With their dreams dashed, can one fractured family find a way to rebuild despite their losses, and will the Lakeside Supper Club be their salvation?

In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, J. Ryan Stradal has once again given us a story full of his signature honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters as they grapple with love, loss, and marriage; what we hold onto and what we leave behind; and what our legacy will be when we are gone. ( )

A time capsule of a story about restaurateurs in Minnesota and the upper midwest. Ned comes from a family who founded a chain of restaurants that spread across the country in post WWII US. Mariel comes from a family who owns a small family supper club in rural Minnesota. Their story is intertwined with loss, grief, and changing tastes of the dining public that occured from the Great Depression through the turn of the century.

Stradal creates sympathetic characters and captures family dynamics through the generations. All of his books so far are embedded in food and beverage culture. ( )

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cx9L7ffvBL_/

J. Ryan Stradal - Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club: Maybe this isn’t better than his first two books. Maybe I don’t care because he’s just about the only one writing Midwest Novels. #cursorybookreviews #cursoryreviews ( )

I was so pleased to find out Stradal had written another book, I put it on hold at the library immediately. His other two books are some of my recent favourites. His stories are set in the midwest, which is the region of my birth, and although I've never lived there, it flirts at the edges of my soul, and maybe there are elements of Midwestern culture that really remind me of some things about Canadian culture, which I know pretty well. He also tells intergenerational stories really well. He introduces characters and shows us what makes them tick, and then shows them from his other characters' perspectives, in ways that make them feel so real, so whole. We all live our own stories, and it's really easy to forget that our stories intersect with those of others as well, and sometimes we will never know how our actions, or even our existence, affects other people. In this book, The central character is Florence, daughter of Betty. Betty took Florence all over the place when Florence was small, which resulted in Florence yearning for roots, safety, and stability, to the point where when Florence became a mother to Mariel, she was so overprotective of Mariel that when Mariel became a mother, she blamed Florence for everything that went wrong. We read from the perspectives of Florence, Mariel, Mariel's husband Ned, and Mariel's daughter Julia, and it is fascinating to experience their stories over the course of nearly a century, most of it centred around the Lakeside Supper Club, a classic restaurant in the wilds of northern Minnesota, a destination for all the communities surrounding it and for vacationers from The Cities, which also endures through the generations, resisting change and becoming a home for a multitude of characters, from Betty to Julia and a bunch in between. This novel invokes nostalgia, but mostly illustrates real lives -- hopes, successes, disappointments, and the movements of the everyday. ( )