I have read (and enjoyed) The Dutch House, Commonwealth and These Precious Days, so, clearly I was going to read this one.
Here’s the blurb
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.
This is a quiet novel more about the characters than the action. It’s a bit coming of age, but also a nostalgic look back at Lara’s younger days. I felt Joe could have been fleshed out a bit more and I am not convinced about the end of the affair (shall we say). But the writing is, as always, beautiful. And I enjoyed all of the theatre, movie, costume and sewing references.
A review