The Chicken Sisters was super buzzy back when Reese Witherspoon picked it as her book club selection of the month back in 2020. I finally got around to checking out K.J Dell’Antonia’s novel to see if it lived up to the hype, and it’s pretty close.
The Chicken Sisters is about two restaurants in a small Kansas town. A pair of sisters started them back in the late 1800’s and handed them down through the generations… with a white hot feud attached, of course. Now, in the modern day, Amanda is a chicken traitor for marrying the son of her mother’s rival. He passed away, but she stayed at Frannie’s and still isn’t allowed inside her mother’s restaurant, Mimi’s.
Amanda gets the idea to submit the two restaurants for a reality show called Food Wars in order to get attention for both restaurants and get one some cash. Amanda’s mother, Barbara, only agrees to do the show if her other daughter, Mae, comes home to help. Mae is living her dream as a host on an organizational reality show in New York City, where no one knows the life she truly used to live. Not even her husband. But, when that dream falls apart, Mae packs up the children and heads to Kansas with her own agenda.
The Chicken Sisters is a family drama at heart, with added spectacle of a small town meeting tension of national attention. The girls and their mother have a lot of past issues to work through, but they are too caught up in sabotaging each other to really work toward any semblance of progress together. If you’ve ever been highly competitive with a sister (raises hand), this one will hit different. (Especially if you are also the oldest daughter who works in TV and grew up in a small Kansas town and never goes back. It’s too real, y’all!)
The Chicken Sisters is a pretty good read, although some of the geography references didn’t quite fit together for me and I craved fried chicken the entire time. Yes, that was my reward for finishing the book. Fight me.
Literary HypeWoman 