Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
Tom Lake By Ann Patchett
I listened to this on audio, such a delight as Meryl Streep was the narrator. Her performative and soothing voice combined with Ann Patchett’s writing resulted in a most pleasurable experience. The story was well done too. Well suited for me as a mother who had three grown children at home during the pandemic and also as the mother of a daughter. I am finding it very interesting to read the pandemic novels of great writers BTW. This is a novel about what we share with our children and what we hold back, about their insatiable desire for stories about us before they were born, and about how much changes and how much stays the same between the generations of women. This is a love story to Northern Michigan and a life dedicated to farming orchards. The point of view may be that of a grown woman in her fifties, but as she recounts one summer and one love affair to her children, she is also telling her own coming-of-age. The structure of this novel was quite pleasurable to follow.
About Tom Lake:
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.
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