Goodreads Choice Awards Book Club discussion

Voted by members for Fiction Additional Read



Tom Lake

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.

Looking forward to reading this!

I really want to get to this one soon!

Unfortunately even listening to Meryl Streep's audio version of this novel failed to hook me in and keep me invested like I had hoped. I gave it an honest go, but the magic never revealed itself to me so I couldn't continue after an hour or two. Maybe I'm just not in the right mindset for it at this particular moment. It happens now & again where I may not love it at first, but then it ends up really working for me later in my life when I give it another go.

I just finished this and am still sorting my thoughts. I enjoyed it overall.

A wonderful story to read on a lazy weekend! Ann Patchett did a wonderful job of dropping the reader into the lives of this family during summer when they are picking cherries on their farm.

Agree with Kim. Just finished and still sorting my thoughts.

I felt confused a lot wondering if I was in the past or present. It would take me a few sentences to pick up exactly where I was.

Slowwwww start. Nearly gagged when I realized the setting was pandemic, but actually ended up enjoying that aspect as it gave reason for the girls being home and the lack of interaction with others, which let to a good reason to dive so deep into the past.

I liked the last quarter, but am still unsure what happened at end of chapter 20 (and I don’t know how to alert for spoilers so I’m being overly vague). I had to use the google to hear what the internet thought. And even still, I’m not convinced I agree with anyone. Or myself.

Then again, even though my thoughts lean 85% one way, maybe I like what became a mostly unsolved mystery for me.

Right now I’m rating 3.5. Maybe I’ll feel different if I sort out my thoughts.

A little late but I finally got around to listening to this (Meryl Streep did a fabulous job, not surprisingly)

Such a quiet, thoughtful and beautiful story. I loved it.