Thane Tierney

Fiction

My Heart

Review by Thane Tierney

In the mid-1600s, two theories competed over the true nature of the heart. English physiologist William Harvey claimed it was a pump. French philosopher René Descartes believed it to be a furnace. While Harvey won the day in the world of anatomy, Bosnian author Semezdin Mehmedinović, in his semi-autobiographical novel, My Heart, finds room for both concepts.

As the book opens, Mehmedinović has suffered a near-fatal heart attack; in fact, his doctor warns him that if “I had to come to him again, I wouldn’t leave the hospital.” A prognosis like that tends to focus the mind, and so in the book’s second section, Mehmedinović composes a sprawling letter to his son, Harun.

Part diary, part travelogue, part philosophical observation and part confessional, this epistle to Harun spans decades and continents. It includes the mundane (father and son listen to Morcheeba and Moby during a desert road trip) and the astonishing, as when Mehmedinović describes a poet friend who turned a restaurant “into a concentration camp.”

Just as Mehmedinović’s physical heart has suffered damage, his emotional one has as well. He apologizes for not having spirited his son out of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war and acknowledges their mutual PTSD as refugees, which has rendered them solitary men. They’re family, of course, but still fundamentally alone.

In the final section, we see the heart-as-furnace stoked as Mehmedinović recounts life with his wife, Sanja, after she has a stroke. As was the case with his son, he wants to bear witness and pay homage to moments whose consequences may only come into view in retrospect. He helps to fill in her memory deficits, but he also acts as an agent of selective forgetting, to shield her from reliving emotional trauma when relearning that a friend or relative has died.

The poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once observed that “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” As we can see from My Heart, this is also how the warmth gets out.

The poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen once observed that “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.” As we can see from My Heart, this is also how the warmth gets out.

FictionFamily Drama

Super Host

Review by Thane Tierney

Bennett Driscoll has what you might call a “Take It Easy” problem. You remember that 1972 song from the Eagles: “I’ve got seven women on my mind / Four that want to own me / Two that want to stone me / One says she’s a friend of mine . . .”

In Super Host, the first novel from Kate Russo (daughter of Richard Russo), Bennett has been taking it a little bit too easy. Once a painter of note, he has slid mindlessly into an indeterminate middle age, where he has been abandoned, in rather quick fashion, by critical notoriety, wealth, his gallery, his wife and any real sense of purpose. While he ponders how to extricate himself from several of those situations, the wealth bit demands his immediate attention, so he converts his estate into a short-term rental while he occupies the detached building that serves as a studio and occasional living quarters.

At this point, the only notable achievement left to Bennett is his status as a Super Host, which he jealously guards, even as it brings him into contact—sometimes too-close contact—with his renters, all of whom turn out to be women. In the hands of an author with darker leanings, this could have morphed into a creep show or even Psycho-esque territory, but Russo plays on the lighter side as the women in Bennett’s life (some intentionally, some otherwise) peel back his psyche, spurring him closer to some degree of self-awareness. 

The book lumbers out of the station a bit leisurely at first, but like a locomotive, it gains steam until Bennett’s life seems like it might derail. Can he regain his painting mojo, and even if he does, will it matter to the critics? And what will he do when his ex-wife, his tenant and his girlfriend all converge in competition for his affection?

Ultimately, Bennett discovers that his great new artistic challenge is one he hadn’t remotely anticipated: a return to the unfinished canvas that is his own self. And the critics he must attempt to win over aren’t the ones who write for newspapers or magazines; they are the people he holds most dear.

In Super Host, the first novel from Kate Russo (daughter of Richard Russo), Bennett has been taking it a little bit too easy.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Rib King

Review by Thane Tierney

In the era of the belated (and semi-involuntary) retirement of the likes of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth, The Rib King could hardly be more prescient, as it centers on a Black man who is the face of a food brand.

The novel’s first half takes place near the beginning of World War I, a time when the Civil War was no further removed from memory than the Vietnam War is from our minds today. And while the formerly well-to-do white Barclay family is inclined to behave less spitefully toward people of different races, they are by no means paragons of enlightenment. Much as in the Depression-era classic My Man Godfrey, it turns out that the key to solving the family’s financial ills may be held by the overlooked butler, in this case August Sitwell. He agrees to deliver a recipe for—and to be the public image of—a meat sauce that establishes him nationwide as the Rib King.

Fast forward a decade, and one of his former co-workers, Jennie Williams, has a product of her own to sell, which sweeps her unwillingly back into the Rib King’s orbit. In this half of the book, Ladee Hubbard’s talent really shines as Jennie navigates a maze of intrigue involving revenge, betrayal, economic exploitation, racial conflict and the often brutal exercise of power.

Hubbard’s depiction of a shadow economy bracketed by race is compelling and insightful, reminiscent of playwright August Wilson’s finest work. Woven into this narrative is a captivating depiction of Black feminist agency at a time not long after white women had gained the right to vote. It’s little wonder that Hubbard won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for debut fiction in 2018.

Ultimately the reason to read The Rib King is not its timeliness or its insight into politics or Black culture, but because it accomplishes what the best fiction sets out to do: It drops you into a world you could not otherwise visit and makes you care deeply about what happens there.

In the era of the belated (and semi-involuntary) retirement of the likes of Uncle Ben, Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Butterworth, The Rib King could hardly be more prescient, as it centers on a Black man who is the face of a food brand.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Summerwater

Review by Thane Tierney

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “Everyone has three lives: a private life, a public life, and a secret life.” It’s the latter of these we see on full display in British author Sarah Moss’ slender yet weighty Summerwater.

One rainy, gloomy summer day in a Scottish holiday park, a dozen or so people are cooped up—or occasionally not—in their cabins, alone with each other, alone with their thoughts. Every other chapter extracts a stream-of-consciousness core sample from the rich vein of a character’s internal monologue.

Becky, a rather petulant teen, is not having a good time because the cabin’s size requires her to share a room with her slightly older brother, Alex, an arrangement neither of them finds satisfactory. David, a retired doctor, reminisces about days gone by, when the other cabin owners were more like a community and less absentee landlords. He also ruminates about whether he should have sold the place back when the park, not unlike himself, still had the prospect of better days ahead. Meanwhile, a young wife named Milly fantasizes about Don Draper, alternately castigating and absolving herself for not being more present with her husband. There are more such moments, of course, but these are illustrative of Moss’ main thesis: It’s not much of a happy holiday for any of the participants.

Perhaps the one thing upon which they can all agree is that the Ukrainian—or perhaps Romanian or Bulgarian—family in one of the neighboring cabins parties way too loudly, and there’s nothing like a gloomy, rain-drenched day to offer the opportunity to obsess. As we all learned from watching the movie Deliverance, nothing sets up a potential catastrophe better than the combination of outsiders and wilderness, and on this point Moss does not disappoint. Like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy, it happens “gradually, and then suddenly.”

Gabriel García Márquez once wrote, “Everyone has three lives: a private life, a public life, and a secret life.” It’s the latter of these we see on full display in British author Sarah Moss’ slender yet weighty Summerwater.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Jubilee

Review by Thane Tierney

Let’s face it: We’re all a little delusional. We may think that we are more (or less) attractive or talented than we are. We may imagine past exploits as more epic than they really were. For the most part, though, these self-deceptions are harmless and don’t interfere with our real-world functioning. Bianca, the protagonist of Jennifer Givhan’s second novel, Jubilee, on the other hand, has amped up her fantasy to Calvin and Hobbes proportions. She believes that her lifelike, yet quite inanimate, doll named Jubilee is her baby. Her living baby.

Many people with PTSD color outside the lines of typical social behavior, and Bianca packs quite a bit of trauma in her trunk, as we see in chapters that pingpong between the eras “Before Jubilee” and “With Jubilee.” Bianca’s first love, Gabe, is abusive, and over the course of the novel, we see their relationship swing back and forth, with transgressions being met with forgiveness in ever-amplifying cycles until the relationship becomes unsustainable.

Fortunately, Bianca escapes and meets Joshua, a made-to-order Really Nice Guy who is willing to indulge her illusion (as does most of her family) in the hopes that she will reintegrate her somewhat split personality. It doesn’t hurt that he is working on his master’s degree in family counseling. But the real world intrudes on their fragile truce between reality and fantasy, ushering in potentially devastating consequences not only for their relationship but also for the family they have so tentatively forged.

Givhan, who, like her protagonist, is a poet, paints a surrealist canvas with vivid colors, even invoking images from artists such as Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo. The richness of her language and her eye for nuance animate her depictions of both the bleak exterior landscape of California’s Imperial Valley and the bleak interior landscape of Bianca’s damaged soul. Through it all, Givhan has forged a compelling tension between psychological drama and romance that makes for a riveting read.

Bianca, the protagonist of Jennifer Givhan’s second novel, Jubilee, believes that her lifelike, yet quite inanimate, doll named Jubilee is her baby. Her living baby.
FictionGothic Fiction

What Happens at Night

Review by Thane Tierney

In Peter Cameron’s latest novel, an American couple referred to only as “the man” and “the woman” check into the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel in an unspecified northern European country. This is no ski junket; they are finalizing a long-awaited adoption of a child they hope will mend the widening rift in their marriage.

So far, pretty normal, right? But not long after check-in, the man finds himself in the hotel bar, where he is befriended by an ex-circus performer of indeterminate age and treated to the local alcoholic delicacy, a lichen-derived schnapps “tasting faintly of bleach and watercress and spearmint and rice.” The town’s two main attractions appear to be the orphanage and an enigmatic healer who goes by the name of Brother Emmanuel.

The man and woman’s first appointment with the orphanage lands them—possibly by accident—in the healer’s den, which might or might not have been fortuitous, given the woman’s apparently untreatable cancer. This turn of events then cascades into a series of Waiting for Godot-esque moments in which anticipation is frequently met with frustration and further delay.

As in Samuel Beckett’s famed play, we learn a great deal about the Americans as they await their next disappointment, chatting among themselves and with the Fellini-ish cast of supporting characters. Every time the reader begin to adjust to a new normal, Cameron slips in something to unsettle it all, such as the hotel’s doors (one of which the man kicked in after losing his room key) being UNESCO-certified artifacts salvaged from a Cairo opera house. That’s the kind of revelation that will make minibar charges seem trivial.

Perhaps What Happens at Night might have been more aptly titled When Serling Met Sartre. It’s a weirdly compelling mix of all the elements that make us human and all the situations that test our humanity.

Maybe these characters should have read a Yelp review before they booked this reservation. It’s likely that the Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel doesn’t get many repeat customers.

Perhaps What Happens at Night might have been more aptly titled When Serling Met Sartre. It’s a weirdly compelling mix of all the elements that make us human and all the situations that test our humanity.

FictionThriller

These Women

Review by Thane Tierney

Anyone who has lived in Southern California for more than six months will already have heard—or will soon hear—a dad joke about its seasons: fire, flood, earthquake and that other one. Sometimes it’s drought, sometimes mudslide, but it’s never something cheery like spring. In some ways, this is the ironic underbelly of the Hollywood-starlet face that Los Angeles presents to the world. While the myth of Los Angeles stretches from the surfer-magnet shores of Malibu to the Hollywood sign and the last tie-dyed hippie enclave of Laurel Canyon, it is also a city that bears a scar: Western Avenue, which runs LA’s length until it crashes into Los Feliz Boulevard. This is where Ivy Pochoda, author of 2017’s mesmerizing Wonder Valley, set her latest stem-winder of a thriller, These Women.

If you drive along that avenue in West Adams, you might not suspect that, nestled among the likes of Antique Stove Heaven and the Barack Obama Global Preparation Academy, there’s a whole other economy devoted to every manner of vice that can be exploited for a buck, from chop shops to no-tell motels and bars that double as drug emporiums. It is in this milieu that “these women”—a restaurateur, a vice cop, a young “dancer,” an aspiring performance artist and her mother—all ply their trades. Suddenly, a string of murders intertwines these women’s lives in unexpected ways. Is it possible that this latest spree is related to a similar one that stopped mysteriously a decade and a half earlier?

Pochoda buttresses her narrative with a distinct and empowered group of women, and it is refreshing to see women in a thriller all acting with agency. Even the dancer is cognizant of her choices and acts only through the compulsion of her history, not controlled by some man. Not since Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source (or perhaps Pochoda’s own Wonder Valley) has a mystery author so successfully and unflinchingly delved beneath the surface of a Southern California subculture to render a portrait that readers will find arresting—no matter the season.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Ivy Pochoda discusses the serial killer novel—and why she let the women do the talking.

While the Los Angeles myth stretches from the surfer-magnet shores of Malibu to the Hollywood sign and the last tie-dyed hippie enclave of Laurel Canyon, it is also a city that bears a scar: Western Avenue, which runs LA’s length until it crashes into Los Feliz Boulevard. This is where Ivy Pochoda, author of 2017’s mesmerizing Wonder Valley, set her latest stem-winder of a thriller, These Women.

FictionComing of Age

Little Family

Review by Thane Tierney

King’s property, king’s property, everything is correct. Elimane, Khoudiemata, Ndevui, Kpindi and Namsa—a family born of necessity, rather than blood—whistle this phrase to signal to one another, warning against potential invaders in their postcolonial African nest. Living by their wits, the group manages to eke out something approaching survival in the hulk of an abandoned airplane, a self-contained minisociety at the fringes of a much larger, glaringly dysfunctional and indiscriminately hostile one. 

In Little Family, Ishmael Beah, author of the bestselling A Long Way Gone, draws a vivid, disturbing and yet life-affirming picture of five young people who band together when abandoned by their families, their government and even society itself. Fortune, they discover early on, favors the prepared. First, Elimane hooks up with a mysterious figure he calls William Handkerchief, who employs the group to render certain confidential—and possibly illegal—services. Not long thereafter, Khoudiemata is able to deploy a combination of beauty and backbone that lands her among the unnamed country’s smart set. 

At one juncture, a former professor and government official turned rabble-rouser delivers an impassioned speech with sentiments shared by many in former colonies: “Look at all you fools, including me, celebrating an Independence Day we didn’t fight for. Some foreigners who didn’t own this land decided that today you were free in a land where your ancestors lived before they arrived. This is why we are not free, because we have allowed someone else to decide when and how we should be free.” With such a universal message, Little Family could easily have been set in Mumbai or Hong Kong, London or New York City—any place where untold riches exist cheek-by-jowl with soul-crushing poverty.

Sometimes, as both Elimane and Khoudiemata discover, all it takes is a chance meeting and the skill to deliver an essential commodity at exactly the right time to propel someone from the outside into the inner circle. And for myriad reasons, it might not be easy—or even possible—to ever go back. But every bird is forced at some point to abandon its nest, and people are much the same—even if, unlike the song, everything is not correct. 

In Little Family, Ishmael Beah, author of the bestselling A Long Way Gone, draws a vivid, disturbing and yet life-affirming picture of five young people who band together when abandoned by their families, their government and even society itself.

FictionPopular Fiction

The Authenticity Project

Review by Thane Tierney

In his 1962 novel, Mother Night, the late Kurt Vonnegut let loose the tale’s moral on the first page: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Clare Pooley revisits that theme in The Authenticity Project, but with a twist: “Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead?”

“Keeping up appearances” was a posh British blood sport long before the days of social media, but in the era of Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and a hundred more, many of us succumb to the siren song of “building our brand” by relentlessly editing the public-facing image of our lives. While that curated presentation has an element of truthiness to it, it’s ultimately unsatisfying and leaves followers believing their own lives fail to measure up. 

So what happens when an aging, formerly semi-famous artist decides to entitle a blank journal The Authenticity Project, launch into an admission of how his life is not meeting expectations and leave the book in a public place for the next person to expand, ignore or discard? As you might guess, the person who finds it, a café owner named Monica, decides to contribute. And so, as much by happenstance as through intentional actions, the journal makes its way halfway around the world (and back again), with contributors adding their respective warts-and-all memoirs.

The secret sauce that spices this book is that all the diarists are busybodies to some degree, so they wind up interacting in strange and unexpected ways. Much like a Twitter or Facebook feed, the book is composed of fairly short chapters (each from a different character’s point of view), and while it moves along at a bracing clip, the thread is always easy to follow.

The story’s confessional tone is in many ways a logical extension of Pooley’s popular pseudonymous blog, Mummy Was a Secret Drinker, but TMI is always balanced by TLC. And while Pooley’s characters’ lives, much like our own, often look better from the outside, they all ultimately reconcile what they pretend to be with what they actually are. 

In his 1962 novel, Mother Night, the late Kurt Vonnegut let loose the tale’s moral on the first page: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Clare Pooley revisits that theme in The Authenticity Project, but with a twist: “Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead?”

FictionLiterary Fiction

The Cheffe

Review by Thane Tierney

It seems unlikely that the Goncourt Prize-winning author Marie NDiaye set out to be the Camus of cuisine, but her latest novel, The Cheffe, brings to mind a number of parallels with the much-revered 1942 French novel The Stranger. First of all, its narrative is laid out in the first person, entirely in flashback. Second, the loner narrator seems to have an ambivalent relationship with his memory. And third, the novel is populated with somewhat astringent characters who aren’t much on small talk.

But let’s leave Monsieur Camus aside for the moment and consider the complicated relationship our narrator has with the woman he refers to throughout the book merely as “the Cheffe” (cheffe being the French word for a female chef). It’s quite clear from the outset that the Cheffe has passed on, and our narrator has some score-settling to do, some to a journalist and some apparently to himself in the wake of her departure.

While it’s not strictly necessary, it is helpful if the reader has some sense of French restaurant culture, which combines the military and the monastery in its rigorous discipline. Real-life chefs often wax nostalgic about the fearsome hierarchy in the kitchen, where even an arched eyebrow from le boss can reduce a sensitive young cook to a puddle. That goes double when the cook in question is carrying not just a knife but also a torch; the narrator’s unrequited love for the Cheffe runs through the novel like saffron threads through a bouillabaisse.

The Cheffe herself is somewhat inscrutable in a quintessentially Gallic way; obviously passionate about her food, but outwardly indifferent to the response it gets. In fact, when her restaurant gains its first star, she concludes, “It’s all over.” It isn’t, actually, but it sets into motion a cycle that propels the book to its unexpected climax. And like a great meal, The Cheffe leaves us pleasantly sated but still wanting more.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, and writes extensively on food-related topics both in magazines and on his blog, templeofthetongue.com.

It seems unlikely that the Goncourt Prize-winning author Marie NDiaye set out to be the Camus of cuisine, but her latest novel, The Cheffe, brings to mind a number of parallels with the much-revered 1942 French novel The Stranger. First of all, its narrative is…

FictionLiterary Fiction

Frankissstein

Review by Thane Tierney

We already replace knees and lenses and hips with superior mechanical parts. We can implant devices to augment our abilities, from delivering insulin to stimulating the heart to beat. What happens when we can replace the whole body? Such is the question at the heart—or maybe CPU—of Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein.

The mechanics of the story are a bit convoluted to sum up in the space allotted, but try to follow along. In alternating chapters, four stories run parallel, one of them in the distant past (the summer of 1816, to be precise) and three in the present. The first tale is a (more or less) straight recounting of the circumstances surrounding Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s creation of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The other three take place in contemporary society and concern a cryogenics facility in Arizona, a young transgender doctor who is mesmerized by an artificial intelligence specialist named—get this—Victor Stein and a recently divorced boor who has perfected a robotic sex doll.

In many ways, though, the story is just a pretext for extended meditations on the meaning of love, the meaning of life and the coming “singularity,” in which consciousness can be uploaded like so many data points to be retransferred to a previously frozen human body or to a “more human than human” replicant à la Blade Runner.

Surprisingly, it’s the sexbot engineer who poses some of the most cogent practical questions surrounding the possibility of cryogenic revival, including this one on inheritance: “Actually I was about to say, you can’t take it with you, but maybe you should! You drop dead. All your relatives spend the money, then bingo! You’re back! Then what?”

Of course there are deeper concerns as well: What happens to the soul in the interregnum between death and reanimation? How do you love someone “forever” when forever is, quite literally, forever? What does gender mean in a replicant body . . . or no body at all?

Much like its spiritual predecessor, B.F. Skinner’s 1948 novel, Walden Two, Winterson’s book occasionally sets up straw men to knock down, but also like Skinner, she may turn out to be more prophetic than she, or we, imagined.

 

Thane Tierney lives in Inglewood, California, just down the road from SpaceX. The closest he’s gotten to robotics was assembling a Mr. Machine toy in 1966.

We already replace knees and lenses and hips with superior mechanical parts. We can implant devices to augment our abilities, from delivering insulin to stimulating the heart to beat. What happens when we can replace the whole body?
FictionFamily Drama

The Grammarians

Review by Thane Tierney

Identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, both named for the same minor Greek goddess, shared everything: a womb, a language known only to themselves, the red hair that set them even further apart from their peers (only 2% of the world’s population are gingers, less than the 3.3% that are twins). They also share a love of English that (and they would adore the irony) cleaved them together as much as it cleaved them apart. 

Long before their first adolescent stirrings, the pair fell head-over-heels for words. Daphne amassed rare ones (rebarbative, hendiadys, aposiopesis) in her notebook, the same way other kids collect sea glass or baseball cards. Laurel looked them up in their father’s massive Merriam Webster’s Second Edition. They played with words, quarreled over words, used words as both rapier and armor.

Author Cathleen Schine is a keen student of both language and families, and The Grammarians calls to mind the likes of Nora Ephron or Joan Didion. It’s not every verbal stunt pilot that can bring a mid-novel excursus about the differences between Webster’s Second and Third editions to a safe landing.

As for the sisters, Schine renders a note-perfect portrait of how shared DNA can foster a ferocious internal rivalry, while it renders the pair nearly impervious to attack from the outside world. When the big rift does descend, it’s a proxy war but devastating nonetheless: prescriptive grammar versus descriptive, Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage versus The Chicago Manual of Style. Daphne’s somewhat hectoring grammar column, “The People’s Pedant,” has found a modest but passionate audience, and it puts her on the obverse side of a coin with sister Laurel, whose poetry celebrates the authenticity of those for whom grammar doesn’t really exist. Words are exchanged, but fewer and more rarely. As they say, the reason that our families can push our buttons is because they’re the ones who installed them.

The big question becomes whether there is a dictionary sufficiently large and complex to contain the words that Laurel and Daphne need to build a bridge back to one another, or whether they will remain like their identical DNA, a double helix whose twin coils never really meet. 

Identical twins Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, both named for the same minor Greek goddess, shared everything: a womb, a language known only to themselves, the red hair that set them even further apart from their peers (only 2% of the world’s population are gingers, less…

FictionFamily Drama

The Lager Queen of Minnesota

Review by Thane Tierney

While the condition generally known as “Minnesota Nice” might seem to imply an unmitigated kindliness, it is more aptly described as passive aggressiveness made palatable by a virtually transparent veneer of civility. This is not to say that hearts of gold fail to beat beneath that veneer, but it might take an ice drill—or a clever wordsmith—to bust through the permafrost.

In The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal ventures back into the kind of kitchen that made his debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, a success—and from there into the ever-evolving world of beer culture. Early on, the reader gets the sense that sisters Edith and Helen Magnusson were not particularly close during their youth, and that condition is dramatically exacerbated when their inheritance favors one over the other. Hopscotching back and forth between the sisters’ stories over the years, Stradal lays out the triumphs and tragedies that have kept the siblings apart, as well as the story of the granddaughter/great-niece who might be their bridge to reconciliation. 

Elder sister Edith comes across as an archetype of Midwestern sense and sensibility: modest, hard-working, self-deprecating, stoic and just a bit too straight-laced to enjoy life to the fullest. When her pies are touted in the press as the best in the state, she regards the ensuing notoriety as a distraction, if not an impediment. Helen, on the other hand, plays grasshopper to her sister’s ant and revels in her ability to transform her parents’ estate into a brewery that markets “the second-bestselling Minnesota-brewed beer in Minnesota.” Her husband, in a moment of inspiration, crafts the tag line that propels the brand to stardom: “Drink lots, it’s Blotz.” But as fans of Falstaff, Rheingold, Schmidt, Esslinger’s, Jax and others have ruefully noted, chilled and frothy heads oft turn warm and flat, and the fictional Blotz goes plotz. 

With decades of silence and unspoken resentment separating Edith and Helen, it may take something stronger than a stein of stout to reunite them, and Stradal artfully keeps the suspense brewing for over 300 pages.

With apologies to McCann-Erickson’s wildly successful campaign for Miller Lite (you know the one: “Tastes great, less filling”), this book tastes great, is quite filling and never bitter. 

In The Lager Queen of Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal ventures back into the kind of kitchen that made his debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, a success—and from there into the ever-evolving world of beer culture.

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