I wanted to share a new book featuring food and family called Saturday Night At The Lakeside Super Club A Novel By J. Ryan Stradel which I received a copy of in exchange for this review. Inside this post is my affiliate links. If you click on the links and make a purchase I will make a small percentage from the products you purchase.
Saturday Night At The Lakeside Super Club A Novel takes us to the Midwest a place I was able to visit since I may never be able to travel to the Midwest and see a Supper Club in person other than the movie Dirty Dancing.
Saturday Night At The Lakeside Super Club A Novel introduces us to four generations of Minnesota folks, where we meet Betty, daughter, Florence, daughter and son-in-law Mariel and Ned, and their daughter, Julia.
I would like to let you know you may want to grab a Kleenex or two because parts of Saturday Night At The Lakeside Super Club is very sad for the Supper Club, which some people love and others people do not.
Saturday Night At The Lakeside Super Club A Novel begins with Betty and Florence who are barely making it though life, wandering the streets of St. Paul. Wouldn’t that have been fun to do with a friend?
Florence misses her father, and her family who lived in a big, yellow house. Florence is determined. when she grows up, she will buy that house. One day, in a restaurant, Betty and Florence meet Floyd, the owner of a Supper Club in Northern Minnesota.
Floyd invites them to ride up with him and they do. Floyd gives Betty and Florence a cabin and jobs. Betty and Floyd get married. Florence and her step-father do not get along. I don’t have a step-father but I can relate to not getting along with our Dads. Can you?
When Mariel is born, as a child, she loves the Supper Club, and Mariel can’t wait to spend the Summers working with her grandparents, and she has so many ideas and thoughts to make the Supper Club better and get better food, and live bands that can play Polkas. Florence is a City girl, this is not for her.
Ned comes from a very wealthy family, the family owned Jorby’s, a popular restaurant chain. His father wants Ned to inherit this chain of restaurants. Younger sister, Carla, would be the better choice, but she is a girl. Carla purchases her brothers share and Carla has her fingers in many different restaurants and more. Ned is not very ambitions, to say it mildly.
Mariel Prager inherits the Supper Club and she loves the restaurant and Ned helps her, because he is out of Jorby’s. Mariel and her mother have not been speaking for a long time, things have happened, many including many angry events.
Florence asks her daughter to pick her up from a Church event. Mariel gets busy, and she forgets her mother. She does resent her mother for long ago happenings. Florence gets back at her by staying at the Church.
Mariel has friends bring food, changes of clothes, blankets and pillows. Florence is entirely content and is put on television about this fight with her daughter. Mariel finally relents and picks up her Mother. So many others offered to take her home, but insists Mariel should. Both ladies are stubborn which leads to funny moments in the story.
I wish I had been alive when Supper Clubs were so popular in the Midwest, because they would have been so much fun to visit. Allowing us to have a good drink, good food, and great entertainment, while having Supper with friends. Supper Clubs are dying out, but GOD-willing they may come back.
The final chapters leapfrog through the years so quickly that the momentum stalls and I ended up with whiplash trying to follow the story along. When Saturday Night At The Lakeside Super Club A Novel should crest it stalls leaving the ending to drag.
I liked reading about Julia, because she was a very different type or women than I’ve been around. She is, a dedicated environmentalist, who loves Trees, Birds like Charlie and I do. Julia purchased a Cabin far out in the Woods to live with Nature which would be fun to visit. Although, I don’t want to live in the Woods. Would you want to?
About the Book:
“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.
Meet the Author: J. Ryan Stradal
Born and raised in Minnesota, J. Ryan Stradal now lives with his family in California, where he is an advisory board member at 826LA and co-producer & host of the literary/culinary series Hot Dish.
His third and latest novel, SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE LAKESIDE SUPPER CLUB, was published by Viking / Pamela Dorman Books in April 2023, and is now available for pre-order.
His second novel, THE LAGER QUEEN OF MINNESOTA, was published by Viking / Pamela Dorman Books in July 2019. Receiving starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and BookPage, it became a national bestseller its first week of release, and in 2020, won the WILLA Literary Award in Contemporary Fiction. LAGER QUEEN was named one of the best books of 2019 by USA Today and NPR, among other places, and its rights have been optioned for television.
His first book is the New York Times-bestselling novel KITCHENS OF THE GREAT MIDWEST (Viking / Pamela Dorman Books). Voted the 2016 Adult Debut Book of the Year in the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Choice Book Awards, and named fiction book of the year by the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association and the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association, KITCHENS has also been acquired for publication in twelve other countries. In 2014, prior to publication, the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society awarded KITCHENS first prize in their annual novel competition.
His shorter work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Granta, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, BuzzFeed, Midnight Breakfast, CNET, and Vanity Fair.com, among other places. He likes books, wine, sports, root beer, and peas.
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
