Publisher Summary:

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 Thoughts:

I started reading this book while on a family trip in Northern Michigan, a short jump from the cherry orchards that dot the northern half of my state, in the bedroom of a cabin while my son napped next to me, and there couldn’t have been a more perfect time to start reading it. However, I was on a family trip and there wasn’t much time for reading, so I set it aside to continue reading when we were home again. When we got home, I also decided to add in the audiobook, read by Meryl Streep, and began reading and listening both. Eventually though, the audiobook version took over as Meryl Streep just added another dimension to an already beautiful story.

At first though, I wasn’t as enamored with this story as I became. I wasn’t quite getting the magic that everyone else seemed to be finding in the pages. It took me a bit to get there, but once I was there, I didn’t want to stop listening.

This is the first book I have read that takes place during the Covid pandemic lockdowns of early 2020, and I love the way that Patchett framed this. It was not front and center; it was actually barely there, just the reason that Lara’s three girls were all together with their parents again at home on the farm. I would forget that there was a pandemic happening in the book for long stretches, and then something small would pop up and remind me, that oh yeah, the lockdown. I loved that it was the impetus but by far was not the star.

It’s cherry picking season, it’s lockdown, everyone is home on the farm, and Lara’s daughters – Emily, Maisie, and Nell, all who have their own lives in more normal times – want to hear the story of their mother’s time as an actress and her romance with the famous actor Peter Duke. I mean of course they did, because the young adulthood of your parents is something you always wonder about as a kid, even if your parent has just a typical life, but if your mom had been in a movie and in plays and dated an actor, of course you would want to know more. And what better time than while you are all locked down together?

So Lara starts telling her tale, of becoming Emily in Our Town, and her time spent in summer theater in Tom Lake, Michigan, which is where she met and fell in love with Peter Duke. These reminiscences are punctuated by their real time as well – with picking cherries and a picnic on their beach and a movie night with neighbors, held outside. Dogs wander through the story as well, Hazel and Duchess and some goats too. Real life concerns and problems, but they always return to the story of their mother and Duke. Which was quite a story!

I loved listening to this all unfold, finding out what happens that summer, where Lara was young and shining, performing as Emily in Our Town and later Mae in Fool for Love. Her friendships, the swims in the lake, her romance. Figuring out life, growing up maybe just a little. There were surprises too, things I didn’t expect and they all fit so perfectly to come to the final ending. I don’t want to say too much, I want you to read it or listen to it too, and enjoy the story as it unravels.

This book is a book for when you feel like lazing about, soaking up words and a story. Meryl Streep as the reader of the audiobook just elevated the whole experience for me. She wasn’t just reading a story, she was Lara, telling the story of her youth to her children in the cherry orchards. This book was absolutely beautiful, and is definitely on my favorites of the year list.