Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. It’s been a busy week of work and writing. I’m working on a new project at work and it’s a lot of new material, but enough about that.
Today I wanted to share with you a book I finished reading a few weeks ago, before my youngest decided he wanted a graduation party. 😉 It was a great read. The book is, “Tom Lake,” written by Ann Patchett. The cover and blurb are below.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK
In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America’s finest writers.
“Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature.” —The Guardian
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:
This is a story about love and loss. The setting is in Traverse City, Michigan during the summer. Two young actors fall in love at a theater company on the shores of Tom Lake. One of them turns into an alcoholic and the other enables him because she’s in love with him.
It’s also a story about betrayal. When Lara, who plays the character Emily in the play “Our Town,” breaks her leg playing tennis, her boyfriend, the infamous Peter Duke, immediately starts a relationship with her understudy. It breaks her heart.
She finds love again with another actor in the theater company that she had originally overlooked. It’s the story of her relationship with that actor and their ability to build a sustainable relationship and family on a cherry farm in Traverse City.
It’s an excellent story about the characters’ lives before they became parents and how their lives evolve as their children grow. “Tom Lake” is a great story, and one that touched my heart as my own children move into the next phase of their lives.
Thanks for reading my post. How about you? Have you read any good books lately? Leave a comment! I’d love to hear from you!