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lisa_mc's review against another edition
3.0
Don't let the title fool you: "The Lake of Dreams" is not a sappy romance or a new-agey parable. It's a tightly packed, well-written story of two branches of a family and the past and present events that affect them all.
After years living a somewhat nomadic life abroad, Lucy Jarrett, the novel's narrator, returns home to upstate New York and her fictional hometown of The Lake of Dreams. The impetus was her mother being in a minor accident, but the changes Lucy finds upon her return are far more than her mother's arm in a cast: Her brother is engaged and soon to be a father, her high school sweetheart is a successful artist, and the town is churning with plans to develop land where a military depot once sat.
In an upstairs room of her mother's house, closed off since her father's death a decade earlier, Lucy finds a packet of personal writings and suffrage literature. This piques her curiosity, and her quest to find out more about Rose, the writer, leads Lucy not only into unknown family history but also to a connection with a famous glass artist.
At the same time, Lucy's own unsettled life comes into sharp relief as she deals with the fact that time hasn't stood still at home in her absence. And the unresolved grief over her father's death when she was a teenager rises to the surface, which involves some other family conflicts and secrets, albeit in the more recent past.
Lucy is not always likable — she gets petulant and self-absorbed at times — but her indecisions and insecurities are piercingly realistic. And her curiosity about her distant relative is infectious: We want to know the whole story of Rose's life as much as she does (plus we want Lucy to get her own life sorted out as well).
Edwards has laid out a lot for herself to manage as an author, but she smoothly and ably weaves the past and present storylines into a hearty, complex tale of loyalty and betrayal, heartache and redemption, love lost and found. The glass motif and the anchor of Halley's Comet add a layer of art that's a perfect complement to the story.
Lucy and her family discover more than one long-lost truth, but the story is as much about the letting-go as it is about the discovery. Edwards roots "The Lake of Dreams" in the past, without sentimentalism, but in the end the novel is about people releasing the past to move into the future, however uncertain it may be.
http://www.kansas.com/2011/01/09/1665288/dreams-past-dreams-present.html#ixzz1Ah8zdfhU
After years living a somewhat nomadic life abroad, Lucy Jarrett, the novel's narrator, returns home to upstate New York and her fictional hometown of The Lake of Dreams. The impetus was her mother being in a minor accident, but the changes Lucy finds upon her return are far more than her mother's arm in a cast: Her brother is engaged and soon to be a father, her high school sweetheart is a successful artist, and the town is churning with plans to develop land where a military depot once sat.
In an upstairs room of her mother's house, closed off since her father's death a decade earlier, Lucy finds a packet of personal writings and suffrage literature. This piques her curiosity, and her quest to find out more about Rose, the writer, leads Lucy not only into unknown family history but also to a connection with a famous glass artist.
At the same time, Lucy's own unsettled life comes into sharp relief as she deals with the fact that time hasn't stood still at home in her absence. And the unresolved grief over her father's death when she was a teenager rises to the surface, which involves some other family conflicts and secrets, albeit in the more recent past.
Lucy is not always likable — she gets petulant and self-absorbed at times — but her indecisions and insecurities are piercingly realistic. And her curiosity about her distant relative is infectious: We want to know the whole story of Rose's life as much as she does (plus we want Lucy to get her own life sorted out as well).
Edwards has laid out a lot for herself to manage as an author, but she smoothly and ably weaves the past and present storylines into a hearty, complex tale of loyalty and betrayal, heartache and redemption, love lost and found. The glass motif and the anchor of Halley's Comet add a layer of art that's a perfect complement to the story.
Lucy and her family discover more than one long-lost truth, but the story is as much about the letting-go as it is about the discovery. Edwards roots "The Lake of Dreams" in the past, without sentimentalism, but in the end the novel is about people releasing the past to move into the future, however uncertain it may be.
http://www.kansas.com/2011/01/09/1665288/dreams-past-dreams-present.html#ixzz1Ah8zdfhU
bashayer_e's review against another edition
2.0
It was good book although I think the main character Lucy was shallow and silly. Some parts of the book I thought it wasn't nesscsry and it was draging on. In genral it was fine read, not to bad.
michelereynolds_edd's review against another edition
1.0
Boring, boring, boring. No real plot, no real climax, nothing to care about. I plodded through thinking that something exciting was bound to happen soon and I have never been so thankful to turn the last page of a book.
barkylee15's review against another edition
2.0
What a complete waste of a good writing talent. Just as with "Memory Keeper's Daughter," I loved the beautiful way that Edwards writes. But good writing can't save a BORING plot.
emilyos's review against another edition
4.0
The first two-thirds of this book went pretty slowly. In the end the slow weaving of the pasts and the present created a story a family, their grief and how the secrets of the past had impacted them. I thought the personal perspective of the women's rights movement showed interesting glimpses of the past.
keribchilders's review against another edition
3.0
A good/easy beach read, good if you’re looking for mystery but don’t want anything with a super complex storyline
aphelia88's review against another edition
3.0
"The air smelled of dust and old paper. Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet." (266)
"It could break your heart to think of it too closely, to imagine all that might have happened, to know all that did." (346)
This is a strange book, that reads like a half-remembered dream. It's a generational saga of family mysteries, and it requires patience. This would have been a four-star read for me if I had been better able to connect with the characters, but part of the dream-like feel is that we don't get to really know any of them beyond the surface, like looking at reflections on a lake.
The main character is Lucy Jarrett, 29 and soon to be 30, who has been successful in her world-travelling career as a hydrologist, studying the ways water influences the world and the way we build. Living in Japan with her first serious boyfriend, Yoshi - a bridge engineer - she is surprised at her own unhappiness, and is filled with a sense of restless loneliness.
When her mother, in the quaintly named small town of Lake of Dreams, breaks her arm, Lucy comes home ostensibly to check on her but really hoping to recover her equilibrium. Instead, memories of the past throw her future into doubt. Her aimlessness stirs up long forgotten family secrets that will change everything.
When she discovers a hidden cache of letters, papers and pamphlets, she sets off to track down the writer, for a lack of anything better to do. When she shows them to her mother, her mother remembers finding a note with the same writing, along with a finely woven baby blanket clearly meant as a gift never given, in the lining of an old family truck. The unusual border motif of linked moons amid floral vines shows up again on an old stained glass panel that Lucy's high school boyfriend - now a gifted glassblower - is restoring, and this leads her to a full set of specially commissioned stained glass in a small chapel on land soon slated for development.
As Lucy finds more letters and unravels the life of the woman who wrote them and designed the windows - and the sacrifice she made long ago - the tragic story resonates on present events as well, including the future of the family home.
Like it's images and metaphors of water and the moon, the story is slow and meandering and recursive. My major quibble is that Lucy's journey was too easy. The letters she finds are more like full stories, supposedly written for someone who will never read them yet magically preserved without many gaps. Having done some genealogy research myself that kind of find - more akin to a very personal diary - is unlikely and like winning the lottery.
The suffrage movement is interwoven well. But it is very difficult to sympathize with Lucy's apathy and self-sabotaging tendencies (, which move rather abruptly into a spiritual awakening (women and the church, or their historical lack of presence in the church, is a major theme). This is a quiet story where all the little plot threads are tributaries that eventually run together, although not necessarily to a satisfying end. A good read, but not an especially memorable one.
"It could break your heart to think of it too closely, to imagine all that might have happened, to know all that did." (346)
This is a strange book, that reads like a half-remembered dream. It's a generational saga of family mysteries, and it requires patience. This would have been a four-star read for me if I had been better able to connect with the characters, but part of the dream-like feel is that we don't get to really know any of them beyond the surface, like looking at reflections on a lake.
The main character is Lucy Jarrett, 29 and soon to be 30, who has been successful in her world-travelling career as a hydrologist, studying the ways water influences the world and the way we build. Living in Japan with her first serious boyfriend, Yoshi - a bridge engineer - she is surprised at her own unhappiness, and is filled with a sense of restless loneliness.
When her mother, in the quaintly named small town of Lake of Dreams, breaks her arm, Lucy comes home ostensibly to check on her but really hoping to recover her equilibrium. Instead, memories of the past throw her future into doubt. Her aimlessness stirs up long forgotten family secrets that will change everything.
When she discovers a hidden cache of letters, papers and pamphlets, she sets off to track down the writer, for a lack of anything better to do. When she shows them to her mother, her mother remembers finding a note with the same writing, along with a finely woven baby blanket clearly meant as a gift never given, in the lining of an old family truck. The unusual border motif of linked moons amid floral vines shows up again on an old stained glass panel that Lucy's high school boyfriend - now a gifted glassblower - is restoring, and this leads her to a full set of specially commissioned stained glass in a small chapel on land soon slated for development.
As Lucy finds more letters and unravels the life of the woman who wrote them and designed the windows - and the sacrifice she made long ago - the tragic story resonates on present events as well, including the future of the family home.
Like it's images and metaphors of water and the moon, the story is slow and meandering and recursive. My major quibble is that Lucy's journey was too easy. The letters she finds are more like full stories, supposedly written for someone who will never read them yet magically preserved without many gaps. Having done some genealogy research myself that kind of find - more akin to a very personal diary - is unlikely and like winning the lottery.
The suffrage movement is interwoven well. But it is very difficult to sympathize with Lucy's apathy and self-sabotaging tendencies (
Spoiler
especially in regards to dallying with the former high school sweetheart although it's obvious her heart isn't in it - but her reunion with Yoshi, and his ridiculously unbelievable acceptance of her confessed unfaithfulness - doesn't seem full-hearted either, which was another major quibble of mine!madamwobbles's review against another edition
1.0
I loved The Memory Keeper's Daughter; it is one of my favorite novels so this was a big, fat disappointment. The writing just seems cheesy. Edwards seems to be trying so hard to make this a flowery, beautifully written mystery and all I got from it was this: the narrator, Lucy, is a dick to everyone because her dad died and she feels guilty, the letters were way more interesting than her story and the "mystery" of her dad's death was so predictable I sighed when the big reveal came up. Hopefully her next novel is better.
jhadler's review against another edition
3.0
Although the pace was a bit slow for my preference, everything was drawn together in a conclusion which not only made sense, but served to echo the author's themes. She makes extensive use of metaphor, which at times seems labored, yet at other times is exquisite.
bookishrabbit's review against another edition
3.0
I love poetry. I love prose. I love beautiful language. But dear god, Kim Edwards, give it a rest. I don't need to know that your lemonade is the yellow of a dandelion on a sunny day. So much unneeded description in this book; it would be half the size if she had left it out. The main characters is also kind of self-absorbed and you want to shake her and tell her to make up her mind. But underneath everything is an interesting concept, and I enjoyed the historical aspect of the story, even though it was a huge stretch how everything fit together.