Lara and her husband Joe own a Michigan cherry orchard, and
all three of their adult daughters are at home helping out during the Covid
lockdown. It’s the perfect time for Lara
to share the story of her brief career as an actress and her involvement with
an actor named Peter Duke who became a movie star. The rapt attention of her three daughters
eggs Lara on, starting with her unplanned audition for the role of Emily in her
high school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town. She goes on to
play Emily in two other venues, and the final production is the one in which
she meets Peter Duke, referred to simply as Duke throughout this book, who
plays her father. Lara so thoroughly
embodies the Emily of the play, that the cast and crew call her Emily, which is
also the name of her oldest daughter.
Two characters with essentially the same name occasionally caused me
some mild confusion in distinguishing between the past and the present or the
mother and the daughter, but not to a degree that detracted from my enjoyment
of the story. The real questions that we
readers wanted answered were why she gave up acting, why did she break up with
Duke, and how did she meet Joe. The
answers to all of these questions are unexpected. This is just a delightful and beautifully
written story of family and the regrettable mistakes we made when we were
young. Lara’s mistakes are myriad and
embarrassing, often reflective of poor judgment, but they all lead to the
contentment that she now enjoys.