The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal: A review

J. Ryan Stradal's popular first novel was called Kitchens of the Great Midwest. This second one might well have been called Kitchens of the Great Midwest With Pie and Beer, but the title-pickers decided on the more original The Lager Queen of Minnesota.

The story centers around three women, sisters Edith and Helen and Edith's granddaughter, Diana. They are part of an incredibly bland Midwestern family, and, frankly, I had a hard time distinguishing between the three as I read their stories. I kept getting them all mixed up.

The story begins with Edith and Helen growing up together. Edith early on showed an affinity for baking pies. Helen was fascinated with beer. For her sixteenth birthday, all Helen asked for was a bottle of beer. When she opened her gift from her parents and found a bottle of root beer, she had a tantrum and threw the bottle through the kitchen window. Later in the day, Edith, who by then was 21 and married, went and bought four bottles of beer of four different brands and left them for her sister in a bucket of ice in the family garage. She asked her father to deliver a note under her sister's bedroom door (where she had spent the rest of the day pouting) directing her to come to the garage. Helen found the beer and was ecstatic because she thought her father had left them for her (he was the great beer drinker in the family). Helen never told her differently.

The sisters' lives diverged and they grew apart. The great break came in later years when Helen and her husband moved back to take care of her elderly widowed father after Edith and her husband had been caring for him for years. Helen took care of him at the end of his life and influenced him to make a will in her favor, leaving the family farm to her alone. Things were already difficult financially for Edith and her family and this was like a slap in the face to her. The sisters' relationship never recovered.

Helen used the money from the farm to invest in her husband's family brewery. Their destiny was to make beer together and they became quite successful at it.

Edith and her husband continued to struggle financially as they raised two children together. Family tragedies eventually left Edith alone to raise her teenage granddaughter Diana.

I won't bore you with all the details of the plot. Suffice to say that through a series of circumstances, Diana, too, is shown to have an affinity for brewing beer and ends up with a small craft brewery of her own. And perhaps you can see where this is all headed.

I had several problems with this book. Mainly, the characters just didn't work for me. This is a book about women and their relationships, but I felt that Stradal didn't have a real grasp on how women think or about their intellectual and emotional life. His three women characters were just too perfect and they all felt unreal. I couldn't really get interested in what was happening to them.

Another part of the difficulty was the timeline, which was just...weird. It went from the 1950s to the present day and it kept skipping back and forth with different characters, making it hard to follow.

All the information about brewing beers and all the different kinds of beers was just overwhelming. If you care about such things then I suppose it could have been fascinating to you, but I am not that person.

All in all, I felt there was a kernel of a good book in there somewhere but this iteration was simply a mess. It was not a terrible book and there were certainly parts of it that I found enjoyable, but I think I am being very generous in giving it three stars.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Poetry Sunday: Don't Hesitate by Mary Oliver

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Poetry Sunday: Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney

My mother was a farm wife and a prodigious canner. She canned fruit and vegetables from the garden, even occasionally meat. But the best thing that she canned, in my opinion, was blackberry jam. Even as I type those words my mouth waters! Of course, before she could make that jam, somebody had to pick the blackberries. And that somebody was quite often named Dorothy. I think Seamus Heaney might have spent some time among the briars plucking those delicious black fruits as well, so he would have known that "Once off the bush the fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour." They don't keep; you have to get that jam made in a hurry! Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust ...

Poetry Sunday: Hymn for the Hurting by Amanda Gorman

You probably remember poet Amanda Gorman from her appearance at the inauguration of President Biden. She read her poem "The Hill We Climb" on that occasion. After the senseless slaughter in Uvalde this week, she was inspired to write another poem which was published in The New York Times. It seemed perfect for the occasion and so I stole it in order to feature it here, just in case you didn't get a chance to read it in the Times . Hymn for the Hurting by Amanda Gorman Everything hurts, Our hearts shadowed and strange, Minds made muddied and mute. We carry tragedy, terrifying and true. And yet none of it is new; We knew it as home, As horror, As heritage. Even our children Cannot be children, Cannot be. Everything hurts. It’s a hard time to be alive, And even harder to stay that way. We’re burdened to live out these days, While at the same time, blessed to outlive them. This alarm is how we know We must be altered — That we must differ or die, That we must triumph or try. ...

The Nature of Things

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