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From Kim Edwards, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter, an arresting novel of one family's secret history
Imbued with all the lyricism, compassion, and suspense of her bestselling novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards’s The Lake of Dreams is a powerful family drama and an unforgettable story of love lost and found.
Lucy Jarrett is at a crossroads in her life, still haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade earlier. She returns to her hometown in Upstate New York, The Lake of Dreams, and, late one night, she cracks the lock of a window seat and discovers a collection of objects. They appear to be idle curiosities, but soon Lucy realizes that she has stumbled across a dark secret from her family's past, one that will radically change her—and the future of her family—forever.
The Lake of Dreams will delight those who loved The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, as well as fans of Anna Quindlen and Sue Miller.
Family secrets dominate this sluggish melodrama, a second novel that recalls the corrosive secret at the heart of Edwards's surprise bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter (2005).
Lucy Jarrett is front and center. When she was 17, she made what she felt was a fateful decision. She harshly dismissed her father's suggestion they go fishing on the lake; he went alone and accidentally drowned. Guilt-stricken, Lucy unceremoniously dumped her Native American boyfriend Keegan and left her hometown, the eponymous Lake of Dreams in upstate New York, to attend college out West. Then came a career as a hydrologist working for multi-nationals and a string of short-lived romances. Now, pushing 30 and unemployed, she's living with her latest lover, the Japanese engineer Yoshi, outside Tokyo. She flies home after hearing her mother has had an accident. It's minor, but Lucy is surrounded by change. Her mother has a new admirer; her uncle Art, who owns the family hardware store, is spearheading a contested lakeside development; and Keegan, married but separated, has a successful glassworks. How curious, then, that amid these upheavals, the jet-lagged Lucy should zero in on the past after discovering some hidden papers. She learns about her great-great-aunt Rose. Back in England in 1910, the 15-year-old had been seduced, impregnated and abandoned by the lord of the manor, that scoundrel. After traveling to America with her brother Joseph, she had been separated from her daughter after marching with suffragettes. All this Lucy learns from letters she has stolen from the Historical Society. Why Lucy should feel a life-changing connection to Rose is never clear; her problem is she's commitment-shy, as shown by her renewed interest in Keegan (forget about Yoshi). The rush of events near the end includes the discovery of an old will, an anguished confession about her dad's boating accident and Lucy's trashing of the family store; being the heroine, she gets a pass.
It's all mush, but the feminist angle may keep the fans loyal.
A long-lost relative, a cache of old documents, a haunting past: these plot-thickeners combined effectively in Kim Edwards's The Memory Keeper's Daughter, a 2006 best-seller that dramatized the damaging effects of a shameful secret on a Lexington, Kentucky family from 1964 through the 1980s. Edwards's second novel, The Lake of Dreams, aims for a similar goal over a longer time span, reaching back many generations to expose hidden connections between a contemporary young woman and her female ancestor who had been erased, until now, from the family record.
Set in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, where Edwards grew up, the new novel makes a strong case for the area's abundant charms, both natural and historical. Edwards grounds her characters in a fictional town about an hour south of Rochester called The Lake of Dreams, named by the Iroquois who were its first inhabitants. Lakes, and water in general, are a key motif here: Lucy Jarrett, the 29-year-old narrator, is a hydrologist living in Japan who makes a trip back to her waterfront hometown and notes big changes afoot among the summer cottages and picturesque shorelines.
The local military depot is closing, setting off a land-grab dispute between developers and environmentalists hoping to preserve the wetlands' delicate ecosystem. The town's lake is also a source of deep emotion for Lucy, who fished and swam in it throughout her childhood and whose beloved father died there in an accidental drowning just before she left for college. "All my nightmares were at the bottom of this lake," she admits; "everything I'd ever lost was there." Having lived and worked abroad after college, first in Indonesia, then in Japan, Lucy uses this trip home to revisit her unhealed grief and to decide where she fits in her family's lakeside life now that a decade has elapsed since her father's funeral, when "the day-to-day ...close[d] over his absence as seamlessly as water over a rock."
While Lucy solves many mysteries about her father during this trip, she also stumbles across another tantalizing enigma. Hidden under a window seat in the rooftop cupola of her once-grand childhood home, she finds a stack of old papers: mostly pamphlets relating to women's suffrage activities, but also a letter from 1925 to Lucy's great-grandfather Joseph -- who had bought this house around this time and started the family hardware business that thrives to this day--signed cryptically by "R."
Lucy continues to investigate as the puzzle pieces fall neatly -- in fact, too neatly -- into place. From local library and church archives, she discovers that "R" was her great-grandfather Joseph's sister, Rose, who was sent away from the family for some sort of scandal, leaving her baby daughter to be raised by Joseph and his wife. Further excursions to Rochester and Seneca Falls suggest that this punishment may have had to do with Rose's activities in the women's suffrage movement or with her connection to a well-known stained-glass artist, whose windows depicting biblical women happen to hang in an abandoned chapel on the nearby disputed land where the military depot is closing.
With not always believable efficiency, every question here gets its answer in the next piece of evidence Lucy happens to find. What happened to Rose's daughter? What was Rose's relationship to the glass artist -- was she his lover, his model, perhaps his colleague? What was the scandalous behavior that banished her from The Lake of Dreams? Could the figures of biblical female heroes in the stained-glass windows of the chapel provide some clues?
The novel's tidiness extends beyond these questions to Lucy's contemporary dilemmas. Her scheming uncle Art, who had feuded with her father in the years before his drowning, hopes to claim the family house and land as part of a waterfront development project. Meanwhile, Lucy's high-school boyfriend, now a successful glass-blower who's consulting about the restoration of the chapel's stained-glass windows, is advocating for the town's environmentalists on behalf of the Seneca nation branch of the Iroquois, of which his mother is an outspoken member. "Everything was connected in a way I had not understood before," says Lucy, and this is true to a fault. Past and present tie seamlessly together, while selective images of water, decorative glass, celestial bodies, gardens, keys and locks, and Jungian dreams repeat and repeat, like a giant craft fair with identical booths.
Edwards is a talented writer whose spiritual-political-feminist story-spinning needs more embellishment, not less, to distract readers from the prosaic workings of its machinery. Sue Monk Kidd and Jodi Picoult have proved that these kinds of novels work best with lots of mess and mayhem, with overstuffed plots and unruly adornments. To Edwards and her next enterprise I say pile it on, sister, bring more wild hair and flowing purple garments and dream catchers, more witch-and-goddess imagery and even more red herrings, and readers will stay longer at the fair.
--Donna Rifkind
Kim Edwards is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, which was translated into thirty-eight languages. The Lake of Dreams is her second New York Times bestselling novel. She is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Secrets of a Fire King. Her honors include the Whiting Award, the British Book Award, and USA Today’s Book of the Year, as well as the Nelson Algren Award, a National Magazine Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has taught widely in the US and Asia, and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
"A few months after my story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King, was published, one of the pastors of the Presbyterian church I'd recently joined said she had a story to give me," she explained in an interview on the Penguin Group web site. "It was just a few sentences, about a man who'd discovered late in life that his brother had been born with Down syndrome, placed in an institution at birth, and kept a secret from his family, even from his own mother, all his life. He'd died in that institution, unknown. I remember being struck by the story even as she told it, and thinking right away that it really would make a good novel. It was the secret at the center of the family that intrigued me. Still, in the very next heartbeat, I thought: Of course, I'll never write that book."
Despite Edwards's quick dismissal of the idea, it would not unhand her. She let several years slip by without going to work on the story, but she never forgot it. When she was invited to run a writing workshop for mentally disabled adults, the experience affected Edwards so profoundly that she started mulling over the pastor's story more seriously. It would be another year before Edwards actually began working on The Memory Keeper's Daughter, but once she did, she found that it came quickly and surprisingly well-developed.
In The Memory Keeper's Daughter, a man named David discovers that his newly born son is in fine health, but the child's twin sister is stricken with Down Syndrome. So, the distraught father, who harbors painful memories of his own sister's chronic illness, makes a quick but incredibly difficult decision: he asks the attending nurse to take his daughter to an institution where she might receive better care. Although he tells his wife that the child was stillborn, David's decision goes on to affect the lives of himself and his wife for the following 25 years.
Haunting, dramatic, and moving, The Memory Keeper's Daughter went on to become a big seller and a critical favorite. The Library Journal hailed it as "an enthralling page-turner" and Kirkus reviews declared that Edwards "excels at celebrating a quiet wholesomeness..."
Now that Edwards has broken into novel-writing in a big way, she is hard at work on her follow up to her smash debut. "I have begun a new novel, called The Dream Master," she says. "It's set in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York where I grew up, which is stunningly beautiful, and which remains in some real sense the landscape of my imagination. Like The Memory Keeper's Daughter, this new novel turns on the idea of a secret -- that seems to be my preoccupation as a writer -- though in this case the event occurred in the past and is a secret from the reader as well as from the characters, so structurally, and in its thematic concerns, the next book is an entirely new discovery."
Among the many fans that Edwards has won with The Memory Keeper's Daughter is beloved novelist Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees), who said of Edwards's first novel, "I loved this riveting story with its intricate characters and beautiful language."
Some interesting outtakes from our interview with Edwards:
"My first job was in a nursing home -- a terrible place in retrospect. It was in an old house, and the residents were so lonely. People rarely visited them. I only stayed there a couple of months, but it made a strong impression on me. Just before I left I went to get one woman for dinner, and discovered that she had died -- a powerful experience when you're 17."
"Though my stories aren't autobiographical, I do sometimes use things from my life. ‘The Way It Felt to be Falling,' a story from my collection The Secrets of a Fire King, uses sky-diving as a metaphor. Like my character, I did jump out of the first plane I ever flew in. It was an amazing experience, but I've never had the urge to do it again."
"One of my greatest times of inspiration is when I'm traveling or living in a new country-there's a tremendous freedom that comes from being unfettered by your own, familiar culture, and by seeing the world from a different point of view. "
"I love to swim, and I love being near water.
The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was that rare thing, a true word-of-mouth best seller, and I want to begin this letter by thanking all the readers who have been part of this amazing experience. I appreciate your passion for books and for stories, your intense and thoughtful conversations, and the comments you have sent to me from across the country and across the world.
Now, I’m really pleased and excited to introduce you to my new novel, The Lake of Dreams. Set in the beautiful Finger Lakes area of upstate New York, this novel is the story of Lucy Jarrett and her discovery of a hidden past, glimpsed first through fragments of old letters and traces left in stained glass windows. Lucy’s quest through the artifacts of history brings her face to face with the dynamics she fled the summer after her father drowned; it compels her to make an inward journey, too, one that will alter her understanding of herself and change the course of her life.
The Lake of Dreams is a book I’ve been imagining for a long time. Years ago I wrote a 400 page draft of a different novel that had some of these same thematic concerns, including a complex family history, the importance of the land, and the comet connecting generations. That early novel ended up in a box in my basement, as so many first novels do, though I did return to it from time to time, and once I even made it 200 pages into another version before I put it aside again. Meanwhile, I finished my story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King. I wrote The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.
Yet the essence of the earlier story persisted, and shortly after The Memory Keeper’s Daughter was finished, but before it was published, I started writing The Lake of Dreams. Those earlier, discarded drafts had finally brought me to the heart of the story, and this time I had the voice, which is always the crucial discovery. Then the characters from the past began to emerge, with all their fascinating revelations. I immersed myself in the writing, and this new novel was well underway before the excitement of the best seller lists and book tours began. When things began to quiet down again, it was a real pleasure to return to The Lake of Dreams, to Lucy and her family and the mysteries of glass, and to the story that was waiting for me there.
I’ll be going on tour for The Lake of Dreams in January. You can find details about the tour schedule by visiting my new website kimedwardsbooks.com
Best wishes to my readers! I hope you enjoy The Lake of Dreams.
Warmly, Kim Edwards
This book, after the huge success of "The Memory Keeper's Daughter" is really very disappointing. Lucy Jarrett, the main character, is a whiny, annoying person. She's self-absorbed and never stops to think of others.
I bought the book based on Kim Edwards' great story in her last book, this one leaves me cold.
11 out of 14 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.LoveToReadItAll
Posted February 15, 2011
I was delighted to find Ms. Edwards latest offering, and rushed right home to read it. I should have taken my time. Edwards' writings are beautiful,her research well done. This plot, however, never thickened. The main character,Lucy,is extremely annoying - a trait that obviously runs in her family. It would be hard to assemble a more unlovable cast of characters than those of the Jarrett clan. Throughout, Lucy never missed an opportunity to make the many tragedies in this story all about her. I was certain that she would pay for all of this in the end, but no. By the close of this tale, I was praying that Iris would come forth and tell Lucy to mind her own business. I can't conclude that Rose really did anything admirable by dumping her child and running off to join the circus. What was the message here? The suffrage movement took precedence?
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.sunnytbear
Posted February 1, 2011
I so looked forward to this book, as I loved The Memory Keeper's Daughter. Both were complex stories, but where Memory Keeper kept you wanting more and kept you enthralled in the story, The Lake of Dreams only left me wanting to finish. None of the characters were really fleshed out; boring. The parts concerning the letters to Lisa were just plain overdone and drawn out. This book could have been so much more.
5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 29, 2011
I Also Recommend:
In this multi-faceted story Lucy Jarrett is at a crossroads in her life and goes on a personal journey, taking the opportunity since she is jobless at the moment and with her Mom's accident decides, to go home. Questioning her relationship with her boyfriend, she contemplates rekindling the affections of an old flame. While there, she finds some hidden letters that capture her interest and she decides to embark on a quest to find out the mystery behind them and her father's death. This is a vividly detailed, beautifully written, simple, yet succinct novel that will appeal to many. I highly recommend.
4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.anonymous67
Posted February 13, 2011
A huge disappoint. Shallow characters, weak plot, choppy writing that needed better editing.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted February 7, 2011
The Lake of Dreams was very disappointing. The main character. Lucy, lacked any depth and was at times very annoying. As a matter of fact, none of the characters were very interesting. The focus of the story took forever to get anywhere. It wasn't until three quarters of the way into the book, that the plot emerged. The author wandered all over the place. I read the Memory Keepers Daughter and loved it. The Lake of Dreams was "dreamless" and not worth the time and effort of reading it. Would not recommend.
3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted June 3, 2012
I see a lot of negative reviews on here stating the characters are not likable. They are flawed, and justice is grey. I feel this makes them more realistic and relatable.
The novel is written in the first person so you are subject to all of Lucy's inner thoughts, selfishness, and paranoia. But this is a book about emotional growth and overcoming loss. It is a book about how that strain plays out subconsciously though dreams and desires. Without that perspective, we would not see the same growth, or lack of growth in the characters.
It is helpful to have some knowledge of the womens suffrage movement and general knowledge of the early 20th century in order to fully appreciate Rose's side plot. A lot of the themes in this book have to do with pride in your heritage, and how the things we are proud of change based on culture and status. It attests to how our perceived knowledge of our past (or lack thereof) shapes our self-image.
The novel is also about guilt and how we make amends for that guilt through faith and good works. There is a line drawn connecting several different cultures' creation myths and the similarities therein. As much as the various characters feel set adrift, they are connected through these commonalities.
All of the many subtle themes running through this novel are all drawn delightfully together through Kim Edwards' beautiful prose. The imagery is very moving. The auther wraps the tones of water throughout all of the passages.
I read this book straight through, getting lost in its lyracism. It is well worth the read. If you do read it, you will be overcome with the desire to go sailing.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 26, 2011
this is the type of book you want to borrow from the library and not one to purchase - Kim Edwards writes the characters nice but they will not stay with you after you are done the book // Lucy (the main character) becomes very consumed with past events and her family past but is very distant to her "here and now" family; she treats her mother and her brother like they don't matter - and her mother is not much better to her two children // I did like the fact that the ending was not expected but it was not also filled with a "dramatic twist" - it was, again, ordinary and real life like // TO PAST EDWARD READERS: give kudos to the fact that Kim writes this story very differently then "Memory Keeper" where we, the reader, were aware of all the story threads wherein "Dreams" we were kept on the out - two very different story-telling styles which I would assume is not at all easy
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted March 10, 2011
I Also Recommend:
I enjoyed reading this book. Who hasn't questioned the direction they've taken, wondering if one past decision, word or action, might have changed their life. One thing is certain, the past is written in stone and can never be changed, but the future offers promise and hope. Lucy Jarrett having spent the past ten years working in exotic places like Jakarta and Japan, now unemployed and restless, decides to return home to The Lake of Dreams. Unsettled by the changes in her mother and childhood home, haunted by memories of her father's untimely death and being reaquainted with old friends and family, Lucy begins to question the choices she's made and the direction of her life. Obsessed by the discovery that her great grandfather had a sister that seems to have been written out of her family's history, Lucy begins searching for the mysterious Rose and her illegitimate daughter Iris. The story of Rose, told through letters written to her daughter but never sent, and her journey from a poor, helpless young girl in England, to her belief in the suffragette movement in New York forcing her to give up her daughter, gives Lucy the insight and courage to let go of the past and begin moving forward to a full and rewarding future. This book takes you to the beaches of Jakarta, the mountains of Japan, the lakes and rural countryside of The Lake of Dreams, New York and to a small Chapel that teaches the importance of women during the time of Christ through it's beautiful and intiguing stain glass windows.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 25, 2011
Dont waste your time. 13 dollars is WAY too much money for such a shoddy book.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 25, 2011
I was so looking forward to Kim Edward's next novel and was sorely disappointed. The characters just did not have the depth needed to empathize with their issues. The main character, Lucy, got on my nerves and I found the circumstances of her research, while plausible, unrealistic that she was able to uncover everything in a matter of a week. Hope Edwards' next endeavor is better.
1 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 21, 2013
Poorly written, unbelievable, too many details at some points and not enough at others. Hated this book enough that I really struggled to finish it!!!!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 10, 2013
It really was bad
Jennza143
Posted April 5, 2013
I was given this book and I was not sure how I felt about it with a 3 star rating. I was not overly impressed with The Memory Keeper's Daughter, but I didn't think it was horrible, so I read this book as well. I do like The Lake of Dreams more than Kim's first novel. It took a while before I actually got hooked into this story (about half way through reading it). I am from Rochester, NY and I love when a book is written about Western NY! I like the way it ended and I even shed a tear. I am going to recommend it to my reader friends and family because overall I thought it was a "good" novel. And from reading this novel, I would like to educate myself with the women's rights movement. Happy Reading!
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Posted December 31, 2012
Good read
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Posted November 14, 2012
a great book club recommendation
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted June 14, 2012
Go to the next result. That is my den.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 24, 2012
"Lake of Dreams" started slowly and the character development seemed a little tedious, but finally the story picked up and wove a good tale around some unexpected turns that kept my attention throughout. Overall, a good story with a sometimes NOT predictable end. Wasn't quite sure where it would really go.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted March 31, 2012
*pounces on a nearby mouse, accidentally severing its head from its body* Oops. *shrugs and eats the head, then pads to result sixteen, leaving the mouse's body*
0 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 29, 2012
This story was basically pointless to me --- very repetitive (I don't know how many times the family lineage was explained) and drawn out. Terrible -- sorry I spent the $$
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Overview
From Kim Edwards, the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Memory Keeper's Daughter, an arresting novel of one family's secret history
Imbued with all the lyricism, compassion, and suspense of her bestselling novel, The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards’s The Lake of Dreams is a powerful family drama and an unforgettable story of love lost and found.
Lucy Jarrett is at a crossroads in her life, still haunted by her father's ...