Lara’s three adult daughters return to the family cherry orchard to help with the crop after the pandemic keeps the foreign pickers away. They pester their mother to tell them about her youthful affair with the famous actor Peter Duke one summer, when they appeared on stage together at Tom Lake, when they were both unknowns with potential and there was magic in the air. What happened there will be pivotal to several lives and will echo for years to come. This is a gorgeous book, both funny and heart-breaking, with a wonderful sense of time and place. Each character, even the minor ones, comes to vivid life and stays in the memory long after reading. The different kinds of love and how contentment and happiness can often be found in unexpected places are portrayed beautifully, while the deceptive allure of fame and glamour is revealed to be both empty and achieved at a high price. A total delight from beginning to end.

If you are in the mood for a very sweet tale about decent people then this will hit a sweet spot for you. It is the pandemic and 3 adult daughters have gone back home and very reluctantly have to help out on their parents Cherry Farm as seasonal workers can't be hired. To pass the time their mother recounts the story of her early adult life to them in intricate detail as she tried to become an actress and about her relationship with a now famous actor. Along the way the relationships of the daughters to their parents and each other is also explored to contrast and compare with the mother's life story.

I admired the writing in this book but preferred her The Dutch House novel. Perhaps it was my current mood and life situation but this book was too much of a cloyingly sweet dessert for me when I needed something a little more gritty.

What do we tell our grown children about our lives before we had them? What memories do we keep for ourselves and what ones do we share, knowing that by sharing they will be forever altered? This book beautifully addresses those questions and more.

Tender exploration of a functional life, a functional family

I read, with so much pleasure, Patchett’s previous novel, where a dysfunctional family dynamics was explored, with tenderness, compassion, and sensitive humour.

Here, in Tom Lake, she gives us a view of what the challenges, knots, byways and hiccups, dramas, slip-ups and pleasures might be in lives where whatever unfolds, these are journeys into hearts of kindness.

In some ways, ordinary pleasures may be harder to recount, particularly where we come to expect the high drama, get addicted to the gothic, and the adrenalin rush of danger and suspense.

She does this rooted, grounded account of lives taking pleasure in the quotidian, beautifully

The novel begins with our central character, Laura (quickly becoming Lara) a young girl of 16 involved in the casting of a production of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’, taking place in her local high school. The play itself and its dynamics, acts as a kind of mirror, to Lara’s own life, both in reality, and in metaphor.

But what is going on here is not to be a linear journey from past to present, because Lara, in the almost present, is a woman in her 50’s, with three daughters, and a husband, who have a fruit farm. The pandemic has brought them all home, to help with the hard and gruelling work of harvest. Emily, the oldest daughter, rocky as an adolescent, now in her 20s, is the one who has decided her roots are also in the land, has gone to horticultural college, and who will take on the family business. Middle daughter Maisie is near completion of her veterinary course. The youngest, and most sensitive daughter, Nell, is the one whose life is most upturned and stopped by the pandemic. She is in training to become an actor.

Lara is asked (as she has previously done) to tell the story of her first love, how it was that she came to meet and fall in love with a huge movie star.

In gaps as they cherry pick, resting in breaks, a fuller version of the family story will unfold, and, still there will be parts of the story which Lara will never reveal, not even to those she most loves.

This book is like some endlessly revealing box of treasures. Its not the events themselves, it’s the beautifully layered, complex characters. This is a character driven story. Patchett seems able to write each one from the inside, so that the reader can resonate with all.

Each individual, small life with its own stages and rites of passage can also be seen in a continuum to the lives and generations before, and the lives and the generations to come.

This truly touches ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’

I received this as a digital ARC from NetGalley. It’s a read to truly savour

Tom Lake
by Ann Patchett

This is the book that made me do the happy dance when I received it because there's something about reading Ann Patchett that makes me glow. I have no words to describe her writing style, her use of language, her structure or her character development, in the way that I cannot describe any of those things about a stretch of time spent in the company of my best friends. None of it matters. I just start to read, the story downloads into my brain and it is as digestible and nutritionally matched as breast milk is to a baby. I get her, we are practically the same vintage, I see everything through the same filter, she actually is writing bespoke to me.

This is a story of the narration of a story, as told to Lara's three daughters over the course of a few days during the pandemic, as they work to collect the cherry harvest on their Michigan farm. With no migrant workers available because of lockdown, they need to get stuck in to the unrelenting, repetitive labour and what perfect time to coerce your mother to spill the details on her former romance with a famous actor, than now?

Lara bravely decides to be completely honest, despite her mortification at certain element, in case their are useful lessons for her young adult daughters, but some are more ready than others to hear what she has to say. From the first page I was captivated by the unfolding story, the bits that had been edited out when they were young children, and the bits that were given a cleaner interpretation. The girls' reactions are so funny, so relatable, aa are Lara's competing inner and outer monologue.

I was completely immersed in the settings, the cherry farm and the summer stock theatre, both past and present and revelled in the friendships and romances between Lara and Duke, Pallas and Sebastian, and the mother /daughter relationships Lara had with Emily, Maisie and Nell. There's nothing accidental about any of the details, nothing goes to waste.

Perfect.

Publication date: 1st August 2023
Thanks to #netgalley and #bloomsburypublishinguk for the ARC

When I was small, we played Pass-the-Parcel at parties where, when the music stopped, a layer of wrapping paper was torn off until ultimately, the winner reached the prize in the middle. Tom Lake is a literary Pass-the-Parcel where each scene reveals another memory of Lara’s past and you are expertly led along the story of her romance with the mysterious Duke.
This is a tender, absorbing novel, set in a cherry orchard in Norther Michigan during the height of the pandemic. Lara’s three grown-up daughters come home to help with the harvest and , as time slows down, beg for the details of Lara’s early life and first love affair with the now-famous actor, Peter Duke.
Ann Patchett seamlessly weaves the past through the present and paints a picture of family, relationships and the small pleasures of every-day life. Excellent.

Back at the home farm, during the 2020 lockdown, Lara’s three grown-up daughters insist she tells them all about her affair with film star Peter Duke and, through her narration, she learns more about who she is and what really matters to her. This thoughtful, meditative, book skilfully juxtaposes the past and the present and explores family dynamics, the quest for contentment and how humans change.

Lara and her husband Joe spend one summer picking cherries with their three adult daughters on their family farm. The daughters pester their mother to tell the story of the time she spent as an actress, in particular her love affair with Duke, now a famous actor. Essentially this is the plot of this novel, but it also clearly revolves around the play Our Town, which I know is based on a book by Thornton Wilder, where Duke and Lara meet as actors in the play.

I am sure that I have missed things in the novel by not being familiar with Our Town, which is central to the plot, and the character of Emily, played by Lara. This novel is a skillfully written and compelling piece, seductive in the way it describes life on the farm, the countryside and the joy of remembered summer days swimming in a lake and playing a part in the evening. At its heart it is a celebration of the ordinary, of family life and wholesome work, and a rejection of the superficial, ultimately unhappy existence offered by Hollywood,

I enjoyed it but it did tend to be fey and sentimental, when I wasn't in the spell of the expert storytelling and narrative I found it cloying, But a good read it certainly is.

A new Ann Patchett novel is always a cause for excitement and Tom Lake is just as well-written and enjoyable as her others. She captures relationship and family dynamics and how certain decisions can take your life in unexpected directions.

The blurb for this novel doesn't do it justice, and neither will my own plot summary. It doesn't sound like a gripping, moving and brilliantly written story. From the back cover description, I only read it because I loved most of Patchett's other books, but I expected it to be a bit dull and domestic. It's really not. But it's quite hard to get that across by describing it. Somehow Patchett elevates what is a fairly simple life story into something truly remarkable.

The story is set in 2020, on a Michigan cherry orchard. The narrator, Lara, and her husband have been joined by their three twenty-something daughters, driven home by pandemic restrictions, and the family are working all hours to harvest their cherries with a much reduced number of labourers. To pass the time, Lara's daughters convince her to re-tell, from the beginning, the story of her brief career as an actor and her relationship with a very famous film star. For a single summer season Lara and the soon-to-be celebrity acted together in a theatre company called 'Tom Lake', set in an idyllic lakeside setting of the same name. Clearly things didn't work out with either her relationship or acting career, or Lara wouldn't be living her current life.

Knowing that things won't work out makes the story more gripping. Whilst the relationship ending is perhaps not very surprising, the fact that Lara ended up completely leaving the world of performing arts so far behind and choosing such a different life suggests something quite dramatic happened. Patchett makes the reader care about the characters very quickly, and she distinguishes beautifully between the younger and older versions of Lara in a way that is very realistic.

It's also intriguing to see the impact the story has on those listening to it, and that is beautifully done. Each listener takes away different things and relates it to their own experience and aspirations, and reacts in a different way. The 'story within a story' technique is hardly original, but usually there is less emphasis given to how the story is received.

Although the story is set during the Covid pandemic it isn't about that at all. The pandemic has simply created the necessary conditions for the storytelling to take place. It's nice to read a book that acknowledges the events that affected everyone in those years without allowing it to become the only topic.

If you enjoy reading very well written books - and who doesn't? - then you will enjoy this. It is so perfectly written and paced, I feel like no one else could have written this nearly so well. It's also ultimately a positive story with an uplifting message - perhaps one we all need to hear sometimes, particularly when younger - that life may not turn out as we expect it, but it might be better than we could imagine. Lara may have lost a promising career and opportunities that thousands of young women would do anything for, but she is content with her life and regrets nothing. I finished the novel feeling not only that I'd spent a very enjoyable few hours reading a really good story, but that things aren't always doom and gloom.

Such a brilliantly involving read. I loved how the author describes Lara's past through her retelling it to her daughters. Everything was so beautifully brought to life by the author.

How many of us know the real story of how our parents met - not a glossed over version of events. Tom Lake tells the story of one couple- Lara and Joe - but recounted to their three daughters whilst confined together on the family cherry farm during the pandemic.
This is a story in two parts; the tale of a family farm and it’s survival, the love and bonds that bind and the insatiable curiosity of the three girls. But also the tale of the young Lara and her unexpected entry into the world of theatre, film and acting - the relationship she had when younger with a later-to-be film star and the friendships and events with the entourage and community of actors she met. Tom Lake refers to the theatrical community where Lara is selected to take on the eponymous role of Emily in the play of Our Town
This is a story of diverging lives, recognising personal strengths, the desire to live and ‘be ‘when young and the pain and beauty of relationships. Ann Patchett expertly weaves the narrative between the recent past and the world of Lara in the 80s and 90s as she evolves into the woman she becomes. Ultimately, this is an old fashioned novel about family, roots and love that the world seemed to briefly recognise during the pandemic.

What a beautiful book. Everything I have read from Ann Patchett has been excellent and this novel is no exception. Set during the Pandemic in a time when time slowed down Lara relates the story of her life to her three daughters. Linking everything together is the play Our Town by Thornton Wilder which both features in Lara’s story and is almost recreated in the setting of the book itself. Five stars!

Tom Lake is an absolute delight - I could tell from the first page that I was really going to enjoy it so tried to make my way through the pages as slowly as possible - I failed. I completely succumbed and had to race my way through to the end. Patchett is a masterful storyteller and I can't wait for more people to read her latest.

I don't fall in love with many books but this one is too beautiful not to.

So my advice would be that if you haven't already seen Our Town then you either read the play or watch the movie (even though they changed the end of the 1940 version) because this book is an homage to that play.

The story of Lara Kinnison, Joe Nelson and Peter Duke is a mirror of Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Lara is a small town girl who plays Emily from Our Town in a community theatre production. Some producer sees her and whisks her away to Hollywood but events conspire and Lara finds herself back in New Hampshire at Tom Lake playing summer stock as Emily opposite the charismatic Peter Duke.

This novel is steeped in the same spell that Our Town casts. It follows Lara into the next generation where, years later, she is a wife and mother -- her grown daughters home during lockdown to help bring in the cherry harvest on the family farm. As they work Lara recounts her life as an actress, her love affair with Duke and how she ended up with the real hero of the story, their father.

This is my first Ann Patchett, it won't be my last. I found the rhythm of her prose hypnotic. I found myself speaking the dialogue with the same slow drawl as used in Our Town. It is primarily a book about family and continuity, about ambitions and real dreams, about love and acceptance and understanding. It is about knowing who you really are and what you really want from life.

I honestly loved this book and I certainly didn't expect to.

Highly recommended. Thankyou to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the advanced review copy.

I am a huge fan of Ann Patchett so was very excited to read this book. As usual it was a beautifully-written story, with realistic characters and a storyline which kept me reading "just a couple more pages" until I realised a couple of hours had gone by. I really warmed to the central character and will definitely recommend this lovely book.

Ann Patchett is a wonderful storyteller, and with this book she does it again.
A tale about a young girl who stars in a film and then gives it all up to run a cherry farm.
The story is not at all like you would think , but is as usual riveting.
Thanks to the author and to the publisher for an advanced copy for honest review.

I’d describe this book as realistic fiction. The author has done a fantastic job of creating imaginary characters and situations that depict the world and society. The characters focus on themes of growing, self-discovery and confronting personal and social problems. The language is clear, concise, and evocative, with descriptions that bring the setting and characters to life. Dialogue is natural and authentic, and the pacing is well-balanced, with enough tension and release to keep the reader engaged.

The E-Book could be improved and more user-friendly, such as links to the chapters, no significant gaps between words and a cover for the book would be better. It is very document-like instead of a book. A star has been deducted because of this.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and I would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

It took me a while to get into this, I'd pick it up, but never really be in the mood .
Then one time, I was, and I threw myself in wholeheartedly.
The while story is just warm, and comforting, and lovely.
The family relationships are the best, they make me want to move in with them, and help run that cherry farm.
Dual timeline works perfectly, we know what's coming for Lara, but still need to know the details.
Perfect summer read.

Ann Patchett's latest novel is a lovely and deeply satisfying read in which a mother tells her adult daughters the story of the summer in which she dated the man who would become the world's most famous movie star.

The novel's framing narrative unfolds in summer 2020 on Lara and her husband Joe's cherry farm in Northern Michigan; because of the Covid pandemic, their three daughters are back home with them and they are all spending their days in the orchards picking fruit because of a shortage of other seasonal workers. As they work, the girls ask their mother to tell the story of what really happened back in the 1980s when she was briefly an actress and became involved with the soon-to-be-famous Peter Duke over a summer working at Tom Lake theatre company.

The story Lara tells is engaging in its own right, with some unexpected twists. At times it feels like a Cinderella story in which an ordinary girl is catapulted first into a major Hollywood movie and then into the leading role at a 'summer stock' theatre, but Patchett explores how the stuff of dreams may turn out to be less than one has hoped. Lara particularly identifies with the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town' but comes to realise the difference between being a great Emily and a great actress and the ephemerality of this life.

However, what makes this such an enjoyable and moving read is the way that it is framed by Lara's telling of the story in the present day. This allows Patchett to interrogate not just Lara's relationship with her own past but also her husband and daughters' reactions. The novel shows an insightful understanding of family stories and secrets, how memories of the same event can differ and how versions of events can be accepted as fact even when they are not the truth. Above all, this felt like a novel about the lives Lara and Joe could have had and the life they have chosen for themselves, the sacrifices this has entailed and their acceptance of these. Patchett's descriptions of acting and theatre are vivid and compelling, but it is Lara's deep love for her family and life on the farm that radiates from the pages of this novel.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.