Not too much to say on this outside of the fact that the it went on just way too long. And I thought the one daughter, Emily, was insufferable throughout. I think if Patchett had shortened things a bit that the book would have been perfect.
Tom Lake follows Lara Nelson as she and her family hunkers down on their cherry farm during the COVID pandemic. The family has gotten sick of podcasts (as we all have in 2026) and Lara’s three daughters (Emily, Nell, and Maisie) want to know the story of how she became an actress and met famous actor Peter Duke. Lara though is reluctant to tell this story for some very good reasons (one of which is that her oldest daughter Emily used to scream that Peter Duke was her father when she was younger) and decides though to tell her daughters parts of her story, and leaving some to herself. To the omnipotent reader she tells all though.
And honestly that’s the whole book, Lara describes acting and chemistry with other actors while she starts off telling her daughters about how she got cast as Emily in Our Town.
I can’t say though that it felt real to me after a while how the family wanted to hear about Peter Duke. Or rather how the daughters wanted to believe he was this great guy and how quickly you see he was just human and kind of terrible here and there. And considering the daughters are in their 20s I had to wonder how they were acting after a while. If they had been teenagers I would have bought their reactions more to wanting to know about the famous actor, but it just felt like they wanted to force their mother to agree her life she chose sucked. I honestly liked the book more when Lara just was trying to get her daughters to fully understand how happy she was with their father, being their mother, being able to live on the farm. And I think a lot of children don’t get that when they see all the things their parents got up to when they were young and why they would have chosen a different path. It would have been nice if the daughters fully got that, but I don’t think they really did in the end. We get some surprises along the way here and there, but in the end it was just a nice long yarn to pass time with.
