What readers think of Tom Lake, plus links to write your own review.

"Tom Lake" by Ann Patchett tells the story of a family that hears a long story about an actor's connection to the mother and creates nostalgia for the recent pandemic. We know what happened, but we go back and forth from the present day to the mother's acting debut, and we still have so many questions to consider.

Novels about someone telling a long story can be tricky because you must allow for details, show the listeners' impatience, and keep moving. Luckily, we have three siblings whose lives are changing rapidly. It would be best if you learned their quirks. The claustrophobia of early 2020 makes secrets come out and see the women's complicated relationship. You will keep reading because of this.

The daughters run together for the first half of the novel, so I thank the author for naming them in alphabetical order. Each has a separate set of farm goals. When one announces she does not want to have kids despite her impending marriage, conversations about the world's fate arise. It brings them all together as one.

Once the twists start coming, Patchett hooks you. All literary characters have a back story, and Nelson's Cherry Farm has them in spades. The book has a different goal than you anticipated. The segues from the past to 2020 happen seamlessly as the author writes in italics to indicate setting changes.

Someone asked me why I wrote these. I do it for the same reason I play fantasy football. I wanted to be a writer and became a teacher instead. A book like this makes you feel like you accomplished something. Learning about normal family relationships with a deeper meaning is good for the soul and brain. “Tom Lake” is that kind of novel. Please pick it up and enjoy it.

This is a story within a story. The author weaves back and forth from Lara’s younger years on stage and screen, to her present life of living on a cherry farm in northern Michigan, during the pandemic with her husband and three adult daughters.

The summer at Tom Lake is the heart of the story. Ann Patchett’s, Tom Lake, is a beautifully told story of love, growing up, and families. It showcases her storytelling expertise. Being from Michigan, it wasn’t difficult to picture the beauty of the cherry farms in northern Michigan.

Tom Lake is the ninth novel by award-winning, best-selling American author, Ann Patchett. As the world turns upside down with a pandemic, Lara’s three daughters come home to their Michigan orchard to help with picking when their many regular pickers cannot. In their early- to mid-twenties, Emily, Maisie and Nell are picking the sweet cherries that urgently need to be harvested. And as they work, they insist that Lara tells the full version of a story they’ve heard before, one that features star of stage and screen, Peter Duke.

When she was sixteen, Lara (then Laura) Kenison was helping with auditions for the play her small New Hampshire town was putting on, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Without any acting ambition of her own, by the time she had listened to numerous young women making a poor job of Emily Webb, Laura, stage name now Lara, decided she could do better. And it turned out to be so. She had a real knack for the role. A reprise of the role in college, where a Hollywood director spotted her, and she was suddenly in a movie.

Eventually, she’s once again playing Emily for the summer stock theatre season in Tom Lake, Michigan, where an unknown, but very attractive young actor is playing Emily’s father, Editor Webb. The chemistry between them is instant, and neither holds back.

Lara’s account of what happened at Tom Lake that summer is interrupted by questions, comments, exclamations and criticisms from her three quite different daughters and, very occasionally, a contribution from their father.

Not every intimate detail is shared; some of the things Lara recalls, she keeps to herself, but: “I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. These two desires do not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.”

Patchett evokes her era and setting with consummate ease. Her characters spring to life and stir a myriad of emotions. Her descriptive prose is wonderful: “She could get more information across with an eyebrow than other people could with a microphone… her thoughts passed across her forehead like a tickertape” and her turn of phrase marvelous: “… It’s the weight of the past that’s pinned us there…”. And no reader could ask for a better plot. This is quite possibly the best novel of 2023.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett is a very highly recommended family drama and will be on my list of best books of 2023.

Set In 2020 at the Nelson family's orchard in Michigan, Joe and Lara have all three of their daughters back home for the lock down. Emily, the oldest wants to continue farming and will inherit the family farm. Maisie is a veterinarian, while Nell, the youngest, wants to become an actress. With other seasonal workers unable to help, they must all help pick cherries. When famous actor Peter Duke dies, Lara's daughters beg her to tell the story of her romance with Duke when she was young and they were both actors at Tom Lake's summer theater. While picking cherries, Lara tells the story of her short lived acting career.

The exquisitely written narrative gracefully moves between Lara's recollection of her past and the present never-ending work in the orchard set before the family. It is a gentle reminder that parents had lives before they became parents and that everyone has a story and lessons learned. The finesse utilized between retelling parts of her past story with the heavy lessons Lara learned all embedded within the present daily grind of never-ending cherry picking is masterful.

Both narrative threads, the past and the present, are equally interesting and compelling. Since Thornton Wilder's play Our Town is a major part of the plot, some knowledge of the play and characters would be very beneficial. This shouldn't be an issue for most readers.

Even though this is set during the pandemic, I appreciated the way this was handled more than I have with any other lock down novel. Lives and plans were disrupted, but work continued for many. Other lock down novels have not even remotely captured the experience of working even harder every day because it had to be done. There is a brief passage where Emily says she doesn't want children due to climate change, which danced too close to my lose rule to leave current events out of novels rule. But once it was added I do wish Patchett had continued the then-and-now theme and mentioned that in the late 70's the change being touted was a new ice age.

Tom Lake is an ode to life being made around choices and events that all lead to where you are today. The true gift of the story is Patchett's skillful handling of the dual narrative and her intelligent, beautifully written story of Lara's life. Tom Lake is one of the best literary books of 2023.
Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins via Edelweiss.

My first inclination was to close this book and put it down as it was hard to get into, but I decided to tough it out. After all Tom Lake was award winning so I decided to persevere. It didn’t get any better. The book is boring. The ending is ridiculous! It’s as if the ending was supposed to redeem the dullness of the plot.

This book is so tedious. I expected something to happen but because the characters (the family especially) are completely one-dimensional, there is nothing to keep one engaged except a past event that really-- though visually pleasing-- is just a big yawn. By the midway point I found the daughters to be completely grating (how do 20 something year old girls behave like silly middle-schoolers?) The father -- although a hardworking farmworker is so ridiculously cheerful (anyone who knows a farmer during the summer months will know that this is so false!) How many times can the mother - Lara - say how MUCH she is in love with Joe and HOW MUCH she loves her girls and HOW PERFECT her life is... And Meryl Streep's reading of the audiobook does nothing to improve the writing.