Book Review: Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
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About The Book
There's more to every love story than what we choose to tell...
It’s spring and Lara’s three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they’ve always longed to hear – of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents lead before their children are born.
Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart.
Why We Love It
A poignant family drama set in the early days of the pandemic, Tom Lake is a beautifully written novel set across two timelines.
Telling the story of Lara, both as a young actress in 1984 and as a mother of three in 2020, it's one of those books that manages to feel quietly intimate with compelling characters and perfectly timed revelations.
With seasonal workers kept away by Covid lockdowns, Lara and her family, isolating together, must pick the farm's ripened crop of cherries. As they do, Lara shares the story of one memorable summer at Tom Lake with her daughters.
It's a story of woman looking back on her life - what might have been, what never was, what made her the person she is today - and as she slowly reveals the secrets of her youth to her daughters, we as readers are taken on that journey of discovery too.
A engrossing story of how we become who we are and find peace with the choices we make.
