This was a heartwarming book about the meaning of family, Midwestern work ethic and perseverance, and, well, beer.
Edith and Helen are sisters who are on very different paths. Edith gets married, has children with her husband who is a trucker, and works at the local nursing home baking pies. (They’re the third best pies in the entire state according to a local paper, but that’s not all that important after all.) Helen becomes obsessed with making beer, goes off to college to study chemistry, meets and marries the son of a cream soda manufacturer, and manages to steal Edith’s half of their inheritance out from under her by lying to their father. After this, the sisters don’t speak again. And now they’re both old women and their lives have taken some very different turns.
I really liked Edith’s character. Edith was just very no nonsense, worked hard, and got on with it even when everything went wrong in her life. I felt sorry for her, especially as her life seemed so hard and so unfair so much of the time, even though she wouldn’t have wanted anyone feeling that way about her. I loved her relationship with her granddaughter, Diana, and I was really invested in Diana’s story, as well. I thought that Diana took after her grandmother in a lot of ways, but still had that connection to Helen with her drive to follow her dream.
I did struggle a bit with the giant time jumps in this book. Fifteen years would go by in a sentence, and life would just still be going on exactly the same as before with a few more problems thrown in. It did move the book through, though… having to cover every year of Edith and Helen’s lives would have been almost 150 years between them and would have been a bogged down mess, but the jumps were jarring at times.
Even so, this was a good read that I recommend. I really liked how beer played so strongly into both of these sisters’ lives, even though only one of them would have seen it coming. Even if beer isn’t your beverage of choice, though, don’t skip this one. It’s a very sweet, ultimately feel-good book about life and family and love.