"When you see a man falling off a ladder above you, Edith believed, you don't envision your arms breaking. You just hold them out."
The Lager Queen of Minnesota is one of those books that is so good, it makes me take stock of everything I have ever read and renegotiate where this new beloved book fits in my all time favorites. If someone told me that I would be deep cleaning my kitchen and folding laundry in record time just to keep this story in my ear, I would have never guessed that it would be a story about two old ladies and beer. The best most captivating stories for me always seem to be the ones that take me by surprise. This novel did nothing if not surprise me chapter after chapter.
This is the story of Helen and Edith two sisters very different in character and personality. One sister inherits the family farm and one does not. This story is about so many things but above all else, it follows these two sisters through their entire lives showing the reader how the inheritance and lack of inheritance changed the course of their lives separately.
I don't care if you are uninterested in how beer is brewed. I don't care if you can't point to Minnesota on a map. I don't care if you are unfamiliar with the chronic work ethic of the Midwestern people. You will love this novel. It is the most joyous and hopeful novel I have ever read. I have never laughed and cried so much over the span of a couple hundred pages of writing.
It is so hard to find an author with the skills and gravitas to not allow the characters to suffer for the sake of the story, or the story to suffer for the sake of the characterization, but somehow J. Ryan Stradal did this and boy does it feel like the most lavish gift a reader can receive. Every once in awhile I read a book with characters that are so real they cross my mind as I go through life and I sincerely wonder how they are and what they are doing without caring that they don't really exist. This book has those characters. I would say that I wish I could meet them in real life, but the author wrote their existence so perfectly that I know them like they were my family.
I listened to this on audiobook and I now have a new narrator to add to my favorites. It was perfectly narrated with all of the wonderful midwestern accents that I get to enjoy every time I interact with my in laws. I cannot recommend this highly enough. It is worth the purchase/library hold/audible credit 100 times over.
Easy 5/5 stars
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