Title: TOM LAKE
Author: Ann Patchett
Read: February 2024
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 all the stars!
Book Description:
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.
My musings:
Every now and then a book comes out of left field
and totally steals your hear. TOM LAKE was that type of novel for me, jumping
from a random book exchange find ("If I don't like it I just bring it
back") to my first 5 star read of the year.
Set on a cherry orchard in those first few surreal early months of the
pandemic, it tells the story of a family thrown together in lockdown, trying to
make sense of the past and the present. I loved the concept of Lara telling her
three grown daughters about her youth and musing about how her life was
irrevocably changed by the events of one long ago summer. Tackling themes like
first love, betrayal, friendship, dreams, loss and the choices we make, its
underlying message is that life can turn in a heartbeat and derail the track
we're on. Lara has long learned the wisdom some people never achieve: to see
what's really important in the big picture and to live the moments. If there is
one thing that the pandemic showed us, it's the importance of family and those
little snatched joyful moments we often take for granted.
Just as Lara brings her character Emily to life, Pratchett presents us with a
cast of unforgettable people who seemed as alive to me as someone I've known
for years. Lara muses that she will grow too old to play Emily, and yet her
fictional character spoke to me across the ages. I related as much to the
younger Lara as to the mother telling her life story to her three grown
daughters, trying to make them understand. Written with insight and a lot of
heart, the story touched some deep sentimental core in me, making me feel warm
and fuzzy one minute and sobbing my heart out the next. What a wonderful read
this was! I am so sad to leave this story and am experiencing the biggest book
hangover right now.
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