Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club: A Novel
"Stradal serves up another saga of food and family, hurt and healing, pitched between cliff-hanger moments. . . that make the pages fly." --People From the New York Times bestselling author J. Ryan Stradal, a story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them 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.
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Community Reviews
I wasn’t loving this book the whole time, but the recall and connection of plot events as the story flipped pov was very impressive. However the ending of the book brought this from 4 stars to 3 stars for me.
Beaucoup de longueur… L’histoire mène pas à grand chose. Ned est centré sur lui même et tout devrait lui revenir même s’il n’est pas capable de faire la job, il a toujours une raison à donner.
In his latest novel, J. Ryan Stradal welcomes readers to Saturday Night and the Lakeside Supper Club. “Lakeside’s duty was not to introduce new food as much as it was to honor old food, to respect the customers’ loyalty to the known and beloved, and create every night a simple sacrament out of ground chuck and pot roast and fried trout.” As a Wisconsin native who grew up celebrating special occasions at Pinewood in Mosinee and spending long weekends with relatives in Minnesota, Lakeside resonated with me. I, too, believe that “Perhaps that was what heaven looked like. A big yellow house on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, with parents making pancakes, yelling upstairs to come down before they get cold.”
Floyd and Betty’s Lakeside Supper Club gets its name when nomad Betty meets restaurant owner Floyd. “Floyd was neither smarmy nor nervous around Betty. He never touched Betty, commented on her appearance, or seemed to say anything specifically to impress her…this is what the term ‘gentleman’ meant.” He asks her to join him, and “the two seconds awaiting her response became the most fertile pasture of possibilities he’d ever imagined…People have the lives they settle for…Betty had been in survival mode for so long, perhaps she couldn’t feel safe even amid a bouquet of miracles.”
“You are the way you are…There’s nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs help sometimes. You just needed help with this…It’s lonely, to not feel like others, to not experience their apparent ease or success…It was the shame that was isolating, not the need for support…She had a partner, a job, and a home she loved. She lived a life that must’ve seemed easy and successful to many, one that many could not earn without a lot of help. She reminded herself that…to merely have this glorious life was no failure…Keeping it together is overrated…There are no prizes for false composure…She would break until…she was another woman perhaps, one who could feel something like forgiveness.”
J. Ryan Stradal’s Saturday Night and the Lakeside Supper Club is an old fashioned, fish fry with a grasshopper for dessert!
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