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A review by hayesstw
The Lake Of Dreams by Kim Edwards
2.0
A rather slow-moving book that couldn't seem to make up its mind what genre it was. I read the blurb, and it seemed to be about a family history mystery, and I enjoy reading such books, but the theme wasn't handled very well. Lucy Jarrett leaves her boyfriend in earthquake-ridden Japan and goes home to the Lake of Dreams in New York to visit her family. She discovers some old papers that suggest that she had some relations she had not known about, and sets out to discover more about them, and they seem to be connected with some stained-glass windows in an abandoned chapel.
So far, so good, except that the story moves painfully slowly, and we are not told much about the family history that he did know, so the startling revelations are less than astartling, and at times in seems to drop into stream-of-consciousness stuff like [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] or [a:James Joyce|5144|James Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1418595211p2/5144.jpg], with the same dream told three times over, and thoughts repeated again and again, so that in just about every chapter I wanted to say "Get on with the story, for crying in a bucket." Other authors seem to handle the stream-of-consciousness stuff quite well, but in this book it just gets boring,
Much of the earlier part is told in the form of letters of a mother written to her young daughter, whom she has had to leave in the care of relatives. The letters seem not to have been sent, and in any case, the daughter would have been too young to read them. They were also highly unconvincing. I can't imagine a mother writing to her pre-teen daughter in 1912 or 1913 about viruses and human interfaces.
This edition didn't have a cover illustration on Good Reads. That's OK, because the generic cover expresses what I felt about the book.
So far, so good, except that the story moves painfully slowly, and we are not told much about the family history that he did know, so the startling revelations are less than astartling, and at times in seems to drop into stream-of-consciousness stuff like [a:Virginia Woolf|6765|Virginia Woolf|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1419596619p2/6765.jpg] or [a:James Joyce|5144|James Joyce|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1418595211p2/5144.jpg], with the same dream told three times over, and thoughts repeated again and again, so that in just about every chapter I wanted to say "Get on with the story, for crying in a bucket." Other authors seem to handle the stream-of-consciousness stuff quite well, but in this book it just gets boring,
Much of the earlier part is told in the form of letters of a mother written to her young daughter, whom she has had to leave in the care of relatives. The letters seem not to have been sent, and in any case, the daughter would have been too young to read them. They were also highly unconvincing. I can't imagine a mother writing to her pre-teen daughter in 1912 or 1913 about viruses and human interfaces.
This edition didn't have a cover illustration on Good Reads. That's OK, because the generic cover expresses what I felt about the book.