Just Jennifer

The Lake of Dreams by Kim Edwards (Viking, January 4, 2011)


Lucy, at a pivotal moment in her young life returns to her home town in upstate New York when her mother fractures her wrist in a car accident. Leaving The Lake of Dreams shortly after her father’s death ten years earlier, Lucy has a lot of loose ends and ghosts awaiting her return and quickly sees that life has continued in her absence, leaving her many things to grapple with. Lucy must face the unresolved relationships she left: with her mother, her brother Blake and Keegan Falls, the one that might have been, but now never can be. Lucy has not put down roots in the past ten years, though she has been living in Japan with Yoshi whom she met while doing humanitarian work in Jakarta. In spite of her wanderlust and unwillingness to face past ghosts, Lucy begins a quest to learn about her family’s past when she finds a cache of letters and suffragette documents in an old window seat along with a small blanket with a very unusual border. This motif is also found in stained glass windows in a local chapel that may be torn down if the local wetlands are developed and not preserved. Lucy searches for clues to her family using the stained glass windows and their creator, certain her long-lost great aunt was involved with the artist. There is a lot going on in this book, a mysterious ancestors, a grieving family, lost loves and land preservation (even that has two sides, the Native Americans who claim it and the environmentalists who want to save the local flora and fauna) but Kim Edwards ties all the sub-plots together neatly, if a little too sweetly at times. Fans of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter have been waiting a long time for Edwards’s next book and most will not be disappointed.

Another novel, completely different in its tone, released this month also has stained glass and women’s rights at the turn of the twentieth century at its forefront.

Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland (Random House, January 11, 2011) takes us to the Gilded Age and explores the life of Clara Driscoll who worked for Louis Comfort Tiffany in his factory and is said to have come up with the idea for the now ubiquitous Tiffany lamp shade that is so familiar. Carefully researched, this book not only explores the lives of working women at the dawn of the new century, but also discusses other social issues, such as the living and working conditions of the poorest of the poor. Larger than life characters and descriptions of neighborhoods of Manhattan from the Upper West Side to the Fifth Avenue Mansions to the early Bohemians add to a rich atmosphere. Clara is fully realized as she deals with being a widow and learns to fit into a man’s world, leading her life as she wishes and a life that will make her happy and fulfilled.