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Trish Tomer

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Originally from the Bay Area, Trish Tomer has been writing a humor column for the Tahoe Mountain News since 2013. She has received rave reviews from the readers of the Tahoe Mountain News who happen to be personal friends. According to her family, she also writes outstanding greeting cards. Notably, her editor has assured her that she will always have a job, so long as she continues to work for free.

After attending creative writing courses at Lake Tahoe Community College, Trish received first place in the prestigious Kokanee writers’ awards. The Kokanee award is highly prized by the few people who know about it, as well as Tahoe’s local fish population.

She’s been married over 40 years to a man she met on a bicycle. His passions in life are Trish, dogs, bikes, boats and fishing, but in no particular order.

TAHOE LOCAL Cover
BOOK REVIEW

TAHOE LOCAL

BY Trish Tomer • POSTED ON March 18, 2024

A journalist relates tales from her life in the eastern California wilderness.

In her nonfiction debut, Tahoe Mountain News columnist Tomer regales readers with stories of her experiences in the wild Tahoe region, where she moved 50 years ago for, as she puts it, the same reason any girl moves to the mountains: “so I'd never have to shave my legs again,” she writes. “Or wear nylons. Or dresses, except for church, which I no longer attend, having received a lifetime ban at the age of twelve.” In the pages that follow, she episodically recounts a string of stories ranging from the tense to the heartfelt, with a vein of humorous thankfulness running through all of it: “If we pause to think, which I seldom do,” she writes, “gratitude helps us cope with the stresses of life,” and this tone informs every anecdote she shares. She relates when she and her unnamed “Hubby,” during her pregnancy, were living in Fish Springs, “a cow-skulls-hanging-on-barbed-wire-fence acreage, renowned for its climate's similarity to hell,” when her water suddenly broke and “I put an end to the evening festivities by requesting a mop and a ride to the hospital.” She reflects on her high school days, navigating the school's “toxic aerosol cloud of dime store cologne…industrial-strength Right Guard deodorant…and hairspray so sticky it became a fly trap.” She tells all of this with an easy storyteller’s grace and perfect pitch, gently ushering the reader from one wistfully amusing scene to another. The author's humor often has a great sense of timing, as when she writes that she and Hubby usually celebrate their wedding anniversaries by sitting on the deck, gazing lovingly into the foam of their microbrews, and asking, “What the hell were we thinking?” Ultimately, it’s Tomer’s enthusiasm for life that’s the most touching part of the book: “It’s easy to forget you’re sixty-six when you're feeling six,” she writes, and her readers may feel young again as well.

An upbeat and funny series of reminiscences about Tahoe living.

Pub Date: March 18, 2024

ISBN: 9798886794236

Page count: 318pp

Publisher: Luminare Press

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024

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