Tom Lake

A story steeped in contentment, Tom Lake is like a pleasurable summer walk filled with frequent stops to admire the beauty. The novel is in fact set in a cherry orchard where a mother gives her Covid-bound adult daughters all the details of her long-ago romance with a famous Hollywood actor. Gorgeous and poignant, like daily life can be if given a chance.

The portrait of a family, in all its messy beauty, working together as they hear their mother's history. Simply unforgettable.

I started reading Tom Lake at a writing residency and it quickly became an important part of my morning routine. I've read most of Ann Patchett's novels, and this was my absolute favorite. The combination of the close ties between a mother and her daughters on a cherry farm during the COVID-19 pandemic and the memories of the main character, Lara's, found family during a production of "Our Town" might seem treacly at first, but this novel confronts real problems, from the future of raising children during a changing climate to the capriciousness of memory, and the love that can… show more.

I will read anything by Ann Patchett, but this was a sublime read. The family who hovers over the story and the story of a long ago love affair, and the melding of Our Town into the whole sensibility of the American vision, was a total delight.

While everyone is housebound by Covid, Lara explains (with redactions) to her three daughters the summer she spent as an aspiring actress in summer stock at Tom lake, and the mad actor and future movie star who was her boyfriend. A wonderful exploration of what makes love, and what doesn't, as lara's daughters piece together the people their parents were before their birth.
It will compel any reader to wonder what their own children think of their lives before those children's existence, and how wrong they may be about it all.

Ultimately, it's the rich characters and the way they relate as a family that draws me in, as always.

This book hit a few nerves about how our past doesn't always carry us it to the future. It's a story about youth and naiveté and then the well measured switch into adulthood and parenting.

Meryl Streep was the reader and at no time could I hear her voice. Her gift to become others was incredible and always had the ability to lead me to whatever place or emotion was intended.

Many of our great authors have written their pandemic novels, and this one takes its place among the best. "Tom Lake" is lyrical, sweet, a testament to life in the midst of turmoil. Patchett's structure seamlessly weaves two time periods as a mother tells her grown daughters the story of her summer at a lake in northern Michigan.

It’s hard not to love an Ann Patchett book. The idea of a middle-aged protagonist recounting a moment from their past isn’t new, but putting that long-ago life into the context of family life and motherhood gives Tom Lake its power. Do our children really get to know who we were before they were born? What if we don’t tell them everything?

I read criticism about it that said there wasn’t enough conflict in this family, and everyone got along too well.

If that’s the worst you’ve got…