Atlantic Ave Magazine September 2023

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entertainment | gotta read By lisa marie
Tom Lake
By Ann Patchett
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three
daughters return to the family’s orchard
in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries,
they beg their mother to tell them the
story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with
whom she shared both a stage and a romance
years before at a theater company
called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past,
her daughters examine their own lives
and relationship with their mother, and
are forced to reconsider the world and everything
they thought they knew.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful
love, married love, and the lives parents
have led before their children were
born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores
what it means to be happy even when the
world is falling apart. As in all of her novels,
Ann Patchett combines compelling
narrative artistry with piercing insights
into family dynamics. The result is a rich
and luminous story, told with profound
intelligence and emotional subtlety, that
demonstrates once again why she is one
of the most revered and acclaimed literary
talents working today. This “sweeping
intergenerational saga” tells the story
of a pampered and defiant South Korean
42 | September 2023 | www.AtlanticAveMagazine.com
matriarch thrust into the afterlife from
which she seeks a second chance to make
amends (Kirstin Chen)—and fights off a
tragic curse that could devastate generations
to come.
The Apology
By Jimin Han
In South Korea, a 105-year-old woman
receives a letter. Ten days later, she has
been thrust into the afterlife, fighting to
head off a curse that will otherwise devastate
generations to come.
Hak Jeonga has always shouldered the
burden of upholding the family name.
When she sent her daughter-in-law to
America to cover up an illegitimate birth,
she was simply doing what was needed to
preserve the reputations of her loved ones.
How could she have known that decades
later, this decision would return to haunt
her—threatening to tear apart her bond
with her beloved son, her relationship with
her infuriatingly insolent sisters, and the
future of the family she has worked so hard
to protect?
Part ghost story and part family epic,
The Apology is an incisive tale of sisterhood
and diaspora, reaching back to the days of
Japanese colonialism and the Korean War,
and told through the singular voice of a defiant,
funny, and unforgettable centenarian.
Now Is Not The Time
To Panic
By Kevin Wilson
Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time
* Kirkus Reviews * USA Today * Entertainment
Weekly * Garden & Gun * Vox *
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
An exuberant, bighearted novel about
two teenage misfits who spectacularly collide
one fateful summer, and the art they
make that changes their lives forever
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring
writer, indifferent student, offbeat
loner—is determined to make it through
yet another summer in Coalfield, Tennessee,
when she meets Zeke, a talented artist
who has just moved into his grandmother’s
house and who is as awkward as Frankie is.
Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly,
and when the two jointly make an unsigned
poster, shot through with an enigmatic
phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone
who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled
with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the
law is skinny with hunger for us.
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