Two sisters vie for the the ultimate $100,000 prize in a restaurant food competition and come out of the experience with a renewed sense of family, life and love.
Years ago two sisters created a chicken restaurant. As in some families, there was jealousy and fighting. The two sisters decided to go there separate ways and establish two restaurants…Chicken Mimi’s a down home chicken and biscuit place and Frannie’s a more upscale (they sell mozzarella sticks) chicken and biscuit place.
Amanda Moore who works at Frannie’s and is the daughter-in-law of the owner, decides to apply to a food reality show called Food Wars. Her idea is for them to come to their small town and taste both Frannie’s and Mimi’s chicken and decide which is better. Her logic being that exposure to their restaurants and the prize which Amanda is sure Frannie’s will win will have people from all over coming to the restaurant. She just has to get her sister Mae on board. You see while Amanda works at Frannie’s, Mae’s loyalty is to Mimi’s, their mother’s restaurant.
Mae, who lives in New York has a chaotic lifestyle with her two children and handsome husband. She is an organizational master with a best selling book and is not very interested in Amanda’s idea. That is until she gets let go of what was suppose to be a promising television career. Mae decides to go back home to their tiny town in Kansas to get a bit of exposure from the television show in hopes of reviving her career.
What neither sister ever expects is that the reality show, in order to create as much drama for their viewers as possible, begins to pit the two restaurants against each other, as well as the two sisters who have not been very close in quite a while. Mae and Amanda begin to turn on each other and in the process out long hidden family secrets, much to the other family member’s distress and embarrassment, but to the joy of the producers of the reality show.
Then Mae’s husband Jay, who always thought Mae lived in Kansas City, not a small town, and her family restaurant was a fancy establishment, not a chicken and biscuit joint, sees an embarrassing video going around and decides to come to the town to find out why Mae has been hiding her roots all this time.
With all this swirling around them, Amanda and Mae must come to some sort of understanding. Amanda, who is tired of running a restaurant and Mae who is tired of always trying to be perfect must learn who they really are not only to each other, but to their families and more importantly to themselves. Who will win the food war? Is it really worth winning?
The Chicken Sisters is a funny, warm-hearted story of the love and hate between families and about picking up the pieces (of chicken) and putting a generation separated family back together if possible.
Thank you #Goodreads #G.P.Putnam’sSons #KJDell’Antonia #TheChickenSisters for the advanced copy.
Lisa's Cubby 