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

This incredible book by Ann Patchett deserves to be named a Great American Novel. It has everything: an engrossing, multilayered storyline, deeply developed and vivid characters, and embedded literary themes. It's a ten-star book in a five-star world.

Taking place over two summers—1988 and 2020—this is the story of Lara, a 57-year-old happily married mother of three grown daughters—Emily, Maisie, and Nell—who lives on a cherry farm in Northern Michigan. It's the summer of 2020, and her three unmarried daughters have come home to live during the pandemic. Emily wants to take over the cherry farm someday. Maisie is a veterinary student, and Nell is an aspiring actress. Because the pandemic is raging, Lara and her husband, Joe, are unable to hire the usual number of cherry pickers, so the massive workload falls to the family.

While the four women are picking cherries day in and day out, Lara tells her daughters about the summer of 1988 when she played the role of the tragic heroine Emily in "Our Town" at the Tom Lake summer theater in rural Michigan. It is a story filled with love, romance, heartbreak, and wonder. And her girls are riveted because it was during that summer their mother dated Peter Duke, who later became a famous TV and movie star. It's also the summer that Lara and Joe met. (And the best parts of the story are those Lara imparts only to the reader and not her daughters or husband.)

It's a tender and nostalgic novel about romantic love—young love and married love—and the older-age thoughts of what could have been…if only that had happened. It's a novel about the choices we make when we are young and the impact those choices have on our destiny for decades to come. It's a novel about beauty and suffering.

And the ending: It's heartbreaking and perfect. Just like "Our Town."

This is an homage to Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" that not only pays tribute to the iconic American play set in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, but also goes one step further. Patchett has masterfully interwoven the themes of "Our Town" into "Tom Lake" with subtle plot points from the play that follow throughout the novel. Brilliant!

Tip: OK, this is more than a tip. This is strong advice. Take a couple of hours and read "Our Town: A Play in Three Acts" before you read "Tom Lake." Even if you have seen the play or vaguely recall reading it in seventh grade, read it again so it's fresh in your mind. There are many references and allusions to "Our Town" in the novel, and you will get so much more out of it if you read the play first.

Ann Patchett has cemented her place in my heart as one of my favorite novelists. She is truly an American treasure.

"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.