Tom Lake

by Anne Pratchett

This book was about a farming family in Michigan, USA, and we joined them in the height of the cherry picking season during the pandemic. They were having to do all the work themselves as their usual crew of itinerant workers weren’t able to be there.

The author alluded to to the Covid pandemic, but it isn’t central to the story. The lockdown situation seems to throw the family together in a way that probably didn’t happen often in usual circumstances and enabled the grown-up children of the farm to dig into their parents’ history in a way they hadn’t done before.

The mother, Lara, had a life before having children, which I guess all parents do, to one extent or another. Like a lot of kids I know, they didn’t really understand or weren’t fully interested in their parents as people before they became the centre of their world. In this story, it was Lara’s association with a famous actor, Peter Duke, that made her history interesting to them. The bits they didn’t know, they made up in their own heads and believed their own version.

Lara was an actress almost by accident and through a series of twists and turns in her short career, ended up at Tom Lake playing opposite Duke. They had a full-on and a bit obsessive relationship until she got injured playing tennis, when he fairly predictably switched his passion to the understudy who finished the season for Lara. The understudy was his devoted brother’s girlfriend at the time.

Over the course of cherry-picking season, the three daughters pick apart their parents’ story and finally get to the truth of who their parents really were. However, arguably the one of the most important parts, of how Lara ended up with Joe, their father, was brushed over and largely ignored.

It’s a story of ego, relationships and young love, how you can chart several pathways and change direction in life before you find the right course for you. It’s a lovely look at a loving family and it’s as comforting as the cherry pie I bet they eat a lot of.

I found this book (read on Kindle, not listened to on Audible) a very gentle read, with no twists, no turns, no shocks and no challenges. It was nicely written, although not brilliant. It was a pleasant dip into a family who loved each other and I quite enjoyed reading about a functional family after being force fed a daily diet of dysfunction and disaster in the media, where most families are blended, disrespectful, often criminal (or left behind by a crime-fighting parent) and usually drug-addled. There were enough characters to interest, but not enough to confuse.

Despite the narrative going backwards and to current day frequently, it was easy to follow and nobody at book club found themselves confused as to who was speaking or at what point in time they were, as is often the case with modern novels.

This book won’t offend you, it won’t make you blush and it won’t change the world. It didn’t spark a whole lot of conversation at book club.

I gave this book 6.5/10 as I didn’t hate reading it but we struggled to discuss it, to any meaningful degree. All in all, a nice, pleasant read. Four of us voted: our average score for Tom Lake by Anne Pratchett was 7/10. Amazon reviewers awarded it 4.2/5, which makes it a higher score than the harsh critics of Between the Covers gave it.

It was a small book club gathering last night, with only four of us in attendance, but we had a lovely evening with fabulous food as always. I have to pray to the calorie gods for forgiveness after every meeting. Thank you so much to Jan for hosting and her never-ending quest to feed us all despite varying dietary anomalies! A big thank you goes to Boris (the pup, not Johnson) who licked a plateful of caramel fudge, or I’d be typing this from the dentist’s waiting room. I do like fudge!!

Our next book is going to be The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, which according to the front cover (and they never lie) is The Number One International Bestseller, Moving and Unforgettable, Powerful and Compelling. Let us be the judges of that!

Read along with us and please let us know what you think.

All the best

Sarah

'To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.'

- W. Somerset Maugham, Books and You