J. Ryan Stradal’s “delightfully intoxicat-
ing” new novel isn’t just for beer snobs,
said Don Oldenburg in USA Today. His
tale of two farm-bred Minnesota sisters
who become rival brewers late in life
“weaves together a bittersweet but
heartwarming story of family, tragedy,
perseverance, and forgiveness.” Dutiful
Edith married young and has worked
for decades in a nursing home while
baking delectable pies on the side;
ambitious Helen married a brewing
scion and revived his family’s empire.
The sisters have been long estranged
by the time we meet them, but Edith is
about to be pulled into craft brewing by
the plucky granddaughter she’s raised
since adolescence. The obvious contriv-
ances that carry the plot can easily be
forgiven “because the novel is so rich
and satisfying,” said Wendy Smith in
The Washington Post. Each of the three
central characters is “pleasingly three-
dimensional,” and the hard feelings be-
tween Edith and Helen never cloud over
the author’s fundamental optimism. Like
a cold pint, his book proves “a perfect
pick-me-up on a hot summer day.”(^22) ARTS
Review of reviews: Books
P.T. Barnum finally has the biography he
deserves, said Rachel Shteir in The Wall
Street Journal. The “staggeringly energetic”
19th-century impresario was “a bundle of
contradictions,” so “it should not be sur-
prising” that many contemporary portraits
of him tend toward caricature. In the 2017
movie musical The Greatest Showman,
the co-founder of America’s most famous
circus was a champion of the marginalized,
pulling them out of the closet and into the
spotlight. Other chroniclers go to an oppo-
site extreme, painting Barnum as a racist,
an animal abuser, and a con artist—a per-
sonification of America at its worst. Robert
Wilson’s portrait gives us instead an imper-
fect man who evolves for the better. “This
P.T. Barnum may have been a small-hearted
small-timer, but he grew into a humanist.”
“Over time, the author starts to feel like
Barnum’s wingman,” said Jessica Bruder in
“This is a major
book that I suspect
will come to be con-
sidered among the
essential memoirs of
this vexing decade,”
said Dwight Garner
in The New York
Times. It is a story
about the author’s
childhood home,
a yellow shotgun
house in New
Orleans East that saw 12 siblings come
of age before it was destroyed in 2005 by
Hurricane Katrina. But the book “has a
lot more on its mind” than one devastat-
ing storm. The house and its blighted
surroundings offer useful entry into the
larger story of New Orleans’ dysfunction
and generations-long neglect of its black
citizens. Sarah Broom’s elegy for the yellow
house pays tribute to her large, resilient
family and “throws the image of an excep-
tional American city into dark relief.”
The house, long ago, represented a chance
at stability, said Suzanne Van Atten in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Broom’s
Book of the week
The New York Times. From the start, he
casts the Connecticut-born huckster as a
product of his times and an ever-resourceful
self-made man. Raised by pranksters,
Barnum proudly trafficked in winking hum-
buggery all his life, starting with a stunt that
even Wilson doesn’t forgive: He bought or
rented a blind, elderly slave and presented
her as the 161-year-old former nursemaid
of George Washington. When she died on
tour in 1836, he sold tickets to her autopsy.
If it’s true that Barnum later became a bet-
ter man, said Elizabeth Kolbert in The New
Yorker, “‘better’ is a relative term.” Yes, he
renounced slavery in the 1850s and, after
the Civil War, advocated black suffrage. But
during that same decade, his freak show
presented a black man with microcephaly
as the missing link between humans and
apes. “To ask readers to look past Barnum’s
faults would seem to miss the point.”
There is, in the end, no getting around one
of his signature quips, said James Parker
in The Atlantic. “The American people,”
he said, “like to be humbugged.” However
generous he became in later life, however
much he became a fighter for the weak
against the strong, Barnum made his name
and fortune on the kind of bold fraudulence
that will remind almost any reader of the
current occupant of our White House. But
there’s a difference that Barnum would
point out if he could, because if he were
to see what Barnum-ism has become in
our nation’s political theater, “he would
be offended by its humorlessness, and the
crudeness and greediness of its demands
upon our credulity.” His form of humbug-
gery at least promised a laugh. “You’re not
going to be left with nothing.”
Barnum: An American Life
by Robert Wilson
(Simon & Schuster, $28)
Novel of the week
The Lager Queen of Minnesota
by J. Ryan Stradal
(Pamela Dorman, $26)
The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom
(Grove, $26)
mother, Ivory Mae, was 19 years old and
pregnant when she bought it in 1961 with
insurance money after her first husband’s
death. She went on to marry a NASA
maintenance worker who also played jazz
trombone, and together they expanded
and decorated it, using the materials they
could afford. Six months after Sarah was
born in 1979, her father died, and the
home’s unfinished interior slid into disre-
pair. Sarah’s mother, who insisted that her
children present a spit-shined image to the
outside world, made it clear that even close
friends should never step inside the house.
Sarah grew up feeling both love for and
shame about the place, and “she coped by
fleeing as far as she could”—first to col-
lege in Texas, then to New York City and
points beyond.
Katrina scattered the family, and Sarah’s
account touches that mini-diaspora’s
distant points too, said The Economist.
When she returns to New Orleans, she
sees “disaster tour” buses cruising the
devastated, dead-quiet neighborhood that
once was her whole life. Her memoir raises
profound questions: “Who has the rights
to the story of a place? Are those rights
earned, bought, or fought and died for?”
The house that was the source of so much
quiet shame no longer stands. “In her
book, Broom proudly opens its doors.”
Barnum in his prime: The godfather of humbug
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