Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

 

It is the middle of the pandemic and Lara and Joe's three adult daughters have come home to ride it out.  They live on a cherry farm in Michigan and it's harvest time so they all work sunup to sundown as the lockdown means that most of their usual crew did not come to work this year.  As the long days go by, the daughters ask the mother, Lara, to tell them about her brush with fame in her early twenties when she dated a movie star, Peter Duke.

Lara had started her acting career as Emily in Thorton Wilder's Our Town.  She caught on and was flown to Los Angeles where she had a good part in an upcoming movie.  Then the movie stalled in production and she ended up in Tom Lake playing Emily again in summer stock.  Peter Duke was also there and they formed a relationship.  Her best friend, Pallace, is her understudy and she also is acting in Caberet.  Pallace starts a relationship with Duke's brother, Sebastian, who is a tennis pro in Detroit and who comes to visit whenever he can.

The summer goes along and Lara thinks her relationship will last.  She and Duke make plans to go back to Los Angeles in the fall together and get acting jobs there.  But things go badly and after an accident, the relationship ends and so does Lara's acting career.  The girls want to know everything about the summer and about how their mother and father end up together.

Ann Patchett is an American author who is a national treasure.  Her books explore human relationships and the reader will always walk away knowing more about life and others than they did before they started the book.  Patchett has won numerous awards for her novels and also runs a bookstore in Nashville.  Readers of this book will like Lara and be interested in her life story and how she ended up choosing a life as a mother and farmer rather than as an actress.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.