I hate to say it, but Tom Lake feels like a lot of nostalgic vibes and not much else.
When I first dove in, I thought for sure this story would grab me. We're introduced to Lara right as she comes upon that prescient moment when she realizes she'd make a better Emily than all of the girls auditioning, and so begins her brief foray into the world of acting. It's a captivating vignette and a scintillating way to kick off the story.
But alas, it's not meant to be. For slowly but surely, as we intercut between scenes, it dawns on me that this is the dreaded dual timeline. And while not all such stories are duds, chances are good that if a book employs it, one timeline always ends up being way more interesting than the other. And that's what happened here.
You see, Lara and her husband are on their orchard, and their three grown daughters have come home to help them on the farm while hunkering down for the pandemic. The daughters want to know more about their mother's earlier life, and so she's telling them the story of her past.
The crux of the problem is that anything remotely interesting is happening in the past. Lara's stint as an actress, the people and the situations that surround her, her romance with Duke, while all compelling, attribute to only one of the two timelines. Regrettably, this compelling narrative is constantly interrupted by what's happening in the present, with so many scenes of the daughters picking cherries while arguing about their own interpretations of their mother's history. And that just didn't interest me at all.
It's almost as if the book is mirroring Our Town, the play mentioned within, by having the present timeline serve as its Stage Manager character, providing commentary and meaning for the past timeline. But that isn't necessary, and instead of adding to the story, the present only detracts from it.
The writing doesn't help. It has this unedited, rambling, somewhat roundabout style that a lot of literary critics would fall all over themselves to describe as subtle and reflective, but I would just call much ado. It works fine when the subject is interesting, but when it's not, you've essentially combined fairly dull prose with a humdrum plot.
I understand what this book is trying to do. It's taking a collection of prosaic, everyday happenings in the present, reaching back through the strands of time to tie it to the glorious possibilities of youth, and hence elevating the whole thing to be insightful and profound. But it didn't really achieve that. All it did was make me nostalgic for a bygone time. And while there's nothing wrong with that, I need a little bit more to really enjoy a story.
Readaroo Rating: 4 stars
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