Bad reviews

I recently read this novel.

It was a Bad Girls Book Club book, selected by a member as her birthday month book. 

One of the things I love about being a Bad Girl is that we are under no obligation to finish reading a book if it just isn’t grabbing us – or we really hate it. Sometimes books are abandoned after 50 pages, sometimes after ten. In one notable month, both Jenny and I, having read the back cover, refused to even open the book. (Can’t remember what it was.)

Even though I have enjoyed other books by Ann Patchett, Tom Lake was nearly one of those books for me. 

I know there are certain readers – those who pride themselves on only reading capital L literature – who would eat this up with a spoon. I am not one of those readers. Phrases like “gracefully contrasting the dazzle of the ephemeral with the gravitas of the timeless” or “Patchett’s intricate and subtle thematic web” make me want to drop the book and run for my life. 

So the book languished beside my bed. Of course, it didn’t help that at the same time my cat Stella was also languishing, so I was having a hard time reading anything.

I probably wouldn’t have opened it at all if the December Bad Girls meeting hadn’t been postponed until January. At some point I told my friend Donna (another Bad Girl) that I hadn’t been able to open the book. She told me she’d really enjoyed it, not least because much of the plot involves the protagonist’s time in the theatre. Hmm. Okay, I opened the book.

So, Tom Lake: It’s 2020 and Lara and Joe’s three daughters have returned to the family’s cherry farm in Michigan (actually one of the daughters had never left) to be together during Covid lockdown and to help with the cherry harvest. The daughters want their mother to help them pass the cherry picking time by telling them the story of her days as an actress, with particular emphasis on the time she’d spent in the summer stock town of Tom Lake, playing Emily in Our Town and about the actor Peter Duke, with whom she’d been involved and who went on to become very famous.

I really, really liked the novel. And not just because I discovered, reading it after the Christmas miracle, that there were two characters named Maisie. Although that helped.

They say you should not judge a book by its cover and in this instance that is certainly true. But, if they’d set out to do so, HarperCollins could not have done a better job of putting me off this novel than they did. Their pitch was obviously to Literary Snobs, of which I am not one.

How much better it would have been (for me, anyway) if instead they’d decided to use something from this Guardian review, like this pull quote.

Reading that review would have made me want to read Tom Lake. I’m glad that Donna intervened.