This is an unpopular bookstagram opinion but I’m a J. Ryan Stradal hater. I read Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club for book club. I previously attempted to pick up Kitchens of the Great Midwest and almost immediately put it down and wrote him off as not for me, and after this one, I stand by that initial judgement. I listened to this on audio, and even a great narrator did not help. This book follows Mariel and her family - Mariel’s storyline is the main current day story, and stories of her husband Ned and mother Florence in different timelines are woven throughout. In the present day, Mariel owns the Lakeside Supper Club.

When I was reading this, especially Ned’s sections, I was just thinking… are you truly this idiotic and naive? Ned is embarrassingly ignorant, and doesn’t care to try to do much of anything except the bare minimum. He has no work ethic, so his future with his family business is pretty obvious from the start. It was pretty unbelievable that Mariel, who is smart and hardworking, would be interested in him at all. The foreshadowing is so heavy in every aspect of this story - almost like to a point that it is disrespectful? Like I did not need that much handholding to figure out where this was going. There is a tragedy in the middle, but it was so obviously clear what was going to happen down to the details of how it happened, because the build up was too much. The ending was so unnecessary and just a weird choice. The timelines were so jumpy that I was often confused about where we were. There were a lot of side characters that didn’t add anything to the main plot or enrich the stories of the main characters. Characters would do things that seemed, well, out of character with how they were previously described and portrayed. There was also some weird fertility stuff to where you could tell this book was written by a man. Everything about this book felt so forced. It gives me the ick tbh. Also like why is the midwest Stradal’s entire personality? It’s not the only place with cozy charm.

Reading this cemented the fact that Stradal’s writing is not for me, and I don’t plan to read any more of his work unless I am overruled by book club.