Tom Lake

In a year when the perennial favorite, Our Town, slipped from inclusion on the list of the top ten high school plays and musicals performed since its inception in 1938, to the rescue comes Ann Patchett’s novel Tom Lake—a rallying cry for the play’s importance to the high school experience, to everyone’s experience, and to the importance of playing Emily. Crafted as the story of a play (and a character) within a story, Patchett’s narrator, Lara, reflects on her time playing Emily in a Michigan summer stock theater company called Tom Lake. For her three grown daughters, the story of Lara’s early life playing Emily is a riveting diversion and window into their parents’ lives prior to their birth, filling the tedious hours of cherry picking on their farm near Traverse City, Michigan, during the COVID pandemic. For Wilder devotees, the novel’s meanderings through Our Town and the...