Tom Lake | Ann Patchett | Contemporary Fiction | Book Review

 

Have you ever shared your teenage adventures with your kids or other people ❓ What was their reaction ❓

I have never tried sharing my personal adventures as I fear they might judge me.

Name of Book: Tom Lake

Author: Ann Patchett

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Publication Date: 1 Aug 2023

No. of Pages: 320

Format: Digital

This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor.

This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn't famous at all.

It's about falling so wildly in love with him - the way one will at twenty-four - that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight.

There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end.

It's spring and Lara's three grown daughters have returned to the family orchard. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the one story they've always longed to hear - of the film star with whom she shared a stage, and a romance, years before.

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.

Ann Patchett is the author of six novels, including Bel Canto, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction. She writes for the New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, the Financial Times, the Paris Review and Vogue. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

My Opinion

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett dives into the life of theater and actors, where the stage is everything. A slow-paced book where nothing interesting seems to happen. I expected the book to be a little more exciting, but everything was just flat. I could not understand why Lara was sharing her love life in front of her husband and daughters. Although it's a family story, I have read far better books based on fiction. The book shows us all the faces of cinema and actors, but the author's tone was devoid of any excitement. Some things were entirely not needed and did not make any sense. The only thing that I liked was Lara's daughters. If you want to read something that goes around a family, then this is the book for you. The book deserves 3 stars.

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