A review by lucybbookstuff
Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club by J. Ryan Stradal

hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Not a bad book or experience, but certainly not my favorite. I think I was expecting mostly heartwarming small-town charm and not quite so much abject trauma...

I really hated waiting around for the baby to die. And I hated that the main character died at the end so unceremoniously. And I was clearly supposed to find this restaurant charming, but I mostly was just thanking every god and my family that I wasn't born into any kind of business dynasty.

As a multigenerational story, this left me quite unsatisfied. I didn't feel like most of the generational drama was tied up very well. I don't even mean that it wasn't cute or nice enough, I mean it just wasn't done well.

I also didn't love that this story, which is so much about women, relationships between women, and pregnancy, was written by a man. I'm not sure if he didn't do it well enough for me because he is a man or because he just didn't do it well. But either way, that rubbed me the wrong way. (Which is not to say that men should never write women's stories. But this one in particular seemed like a weird one for a man to tell.)

In the end, I enjoyed the writing and the Midwest humor. But this was not the story for me.