Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

Amy   

women's fiction

Lara, Joe, and their three 20-something year old daughters are stuck together on the family cherry farm during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Over the course of several days, Lara tells her daughters about her experiences as an actress in her youth.  Her story is centered around her magical summer at Tom Lake in Michigan where she did a summer stock theater and had a romantic relationship with a man who would go on to become a world-famous movie star.

Lara’s memories of her lucky breaks, her fun summer fling, and the people in her life were mildly engaging.  Her family members were likeable and the novel was well-told with just the right amount of things being cleverly divulged along the way. It was a pleasant story but could be boring at times. Lara never had big plans for her life and basically lucked into her short acting career and then lucked out of it. She ended up where circumstances took her without making any large efforts to steer her own way. The last 10% or so of the book was the best part. Ann Patchett’s novels are so different from each other and I never know exactly what to expect. I would say this is not one of my favorites she’s written but I certainly didn’t dislike it. It just didn’t wow me.

The best part was the audiobook narration by Meryl Streep.  She was pretty great.  She did have some vocal repertoire and, even in an audio format, her acting was superb. (Not all famous actors make the best audio book narrators.) I kept thinking about how ironic it was that she was reading the point of view of an actress and the story mentioned some real people who are probably her friends in real life.  The part that really made me chuckle was that she had to read about non-singing actors getting parts in musicals. (For those who don’t know, Streep herself, was cast in the movie Mamma Mia and wasn't a great singer!) Thankfully, since I know her (lack of) singing talent, she did not sing the lines from a few songs mentioned in the novel. I think I would have normally given her an A- but, since I am pretty sure I liked this book much better in audio format than I would have reading it myself, I’ll bump her performance to an A for making this an enjoyable experience.