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A review by aphelia88
The Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards
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 (