From the publisher:
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature.” —The Guardian
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family’s orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
“A tender, absorbing tale about becoming who we are.” — People
“A searching reflection on the relationships between theater and life, romance and realism, Tom Lake is perhaps Patchett’s finest novel yet.” — Boston Globe
“Tom Lake is about romantic love, marital love and maternal love, but also the love of animals, the love of stories, love of the land and trees and the tiny, red, cordiform object that is a cherry. . . . This generous writer hits the mark again with her ninth novel.” — Washington Post
“A quiet and reassuring book…highly conscious of…[the] human failure to appreciate the little things.” — New York Times
https://amzn.to/3ERVBcj
I thought there would be a lot of books set during the pandemic, but if there are, I haven’t run across them. This book is about a family isolating together on their cherry farm. The adult children come home to help out since there are no farm hands available to help harvest the fruit.
Lara and Joe are the parents, and they pass their time together by telling their daughters the story of how they met, but that story is intertwined with another more interesting story. Lara used to be an actor. She played the role of Emily in her high school production of Our Town, where she was discovered by a Hollywood producer. She made one movie, did some commercials, then auditioned for the same role on Broadway. She ended up doing summer stock in northern Michigan. Joe was the director of the play, and Peter Duke was the star. Lara fell in love with Duke that tumultuous summer, and her eldest daughter has become convinced that Duke is her real father.
The book moves back and forth between the early pandemic and that summer as Lara tells her daughters the story of her life. In anyone else’s hands this might not work, but Patchett draws us in and keeps us enraptured until all the secrets are revealed. If you haven’t read her, you are in for a treat. If you have, you will appreciate this beautiful tale from a gifted storyteller. Don’t miss it.
9/2023 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch
TOM LAKE by Ann Patchett. Harper; First Ed edition (August 1, 2023). ISBN: 978-0063327528. 320p.
Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™ 