Although lager is not my brew of choice, I find myself ordering a pint at bars ever since I finished J. Ryan Stradal’s The Lager Queen of Minnesota. The novel’s charming story centers on a rift that forms between two sisters when their father leaves the family farm to his younger daughter, Helen. The older daughter, Edith, spends the next several decades just getting by, while Helen builds one of Minnesota’s most successful breweries. The book spans many years of these women’s lives, introducing us to Edith’s granddaughter, who finds her own way into the beer business, and eventually showing us how families can repair themselves. Stradal writes with care about these women, the Midwest, and the virtues of lagers compared to IPAs.
I know some people who haven’t read Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People because stories about teenage relationships don’t appeal to them. They are missing out. At school, popular Connell and loner Marianne run in different social circles. Although his mother works for her family, the two teens pretend to be strangers in public. They have an intense connection, however, that keeps them tethered as they move into college and adulthood. The way Rooney writes her characters’ inner dialogue makes me feel like a trespasser in the most private corners of their lives. Such an intimate portrayal left me uncomfortable at times, but it also rendered me incapable of putting the book away. How could I leave Connell and Marianne behind?
I haven’t stopped thinking about my own relationship with trees since finishing Richard Powers’s The Overstory this past spring. The book focuses on nine individuals and their connections to trees: a child is paralyzed when he falls from a branch, a farmer’s American chestnut survives for generations longer than any other, a soldier is saved when a banyan tree catches him and his parachute out of the sky. These stories intertwine when the characters are forced to address the eradication of America’s forests. While I have never been rescued by a tree, or even fallen from one, they have been important to the landscape of my life. Powers’s prose reminds me of this history.
