Review of “Lake of Dreams”
With the anticipated arrival of Kim Edwards in the Triad on January 19th, I thought I’d post a good article from USA Today that was written shortly after Edwards’ new novel, The Lake of Dreams, was released. Enjoy! (Don’t forget to get your tickets today: www.bookmarks.roundtablelive.org)
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011-01-06-Edwards06_CV_N.htm By Carol Memmott
This demure, self-assured woman is rarely recognized when she’s out and about in this horse-centric city nestled in Kentucky’s Bluegrass region. But she rocked the book world and the sensibilities of readers in dozens of countries with her debut novel, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.
The story of a physician who in 1964 gives away his Down syndrome newborn and tells his wife their daughter died just after birth hit the sweet spot on best-seller lists and, more important, in readers’ hearts.
Edwards, 52, is a portrait of tranquility as she talks about the success of Memory Keeper’s and her new follow-up novel, The Lake of Dreams. She knows how much people loved her first book, and she knows it’s a tough act to follow — especially because some fans had hoped she would write another book about Phoebe, the adored Down syndrome girl at the center of the tale.
Nothing, she says, could have prepared her for readers’ response. “It had been so exciting but distracting to think about this whole world who had read Memory Keeper’s Daughter.”
But success hasn’t changed her.
The modest home in a middle-class Lexington suburb where she and her family have lived for more than a decade does not reflect her financial success. It’s decorated simply, accented by artifacts she and her husband collected during the five years they spent teaching English in Malaysia, Japan and Cambodia in the 1990s after she completed her graduate work in linguistics.
Even though she had published an award-winning short story collection, The Secrets of the Fire King, in 1997, it was Memory Keeper’s that brought her fame. Published in hardcover in 2005, it sold a healthy but modest 60,000 copies. It became a huge best seller in paperback a year later, thanks to a perfect alignment of publishing strategies— and energetic hand-selling by booksellers, especially independents. The staff at the Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, for example, was so enthusiastic they decorated their display window with a gauzy, white baby dress superimposed over a black background — just like the haunting cover of the book. Fervent fans told friends and family about the remarkable novel and the tragic secret at its center. The book also became, and still is, a book club staple.
It was Edwards’ storytelling prowess that gave the book its punch. “We all have secrets. We’ve all kept secrets. We’ve had secrets kept from us and we know how that feels,” Edwards says. “It’s a universal experience that connected with people.”
That resounding connection is the reason booksellers like Brooke Raby of Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington still recommend the book. And Edwards is greeted warmly by the store’s booksellers when she stops in for a visit.
And those who understand the story because of personal experience have embraced it, too. “Kim did a wonderful job depicting Phoebe as a delightful child and young woman,” says Eileen Miot of Paris, Ky., a huge fan of the book, whose 3-year-old daughter, Marie-Claire, has Down syndrome. But it’s the love at the center of the story, she says, that has made it universally popular. “Everybody understands a story about love and missing out on love.”
Edwards tells a very different tale in The Lake of Dreams. It’s the story of Lucy Jarrett, who returns to her hometown of Lake of Dreams after her mother is injured in a minor car accident. Lucy had fled Lake of Dreams a decade before, after her father’s death by drowning.
Her visit becomes a search for resolution from the heartbreak she suffered after her father’s death, as well as a detective story when she discovers old letters in her mother’s house. They lead her to investigate what happened to the letter writer, Rose, her great-grandfather’s suffragette sister who was forced to give up her illegitimate daughter. The fictional town in which the novel is set is located in the Finger Lakes Region of New York state, where Edwards grew up. “I knew the lakes well,” says Edwards who shows a visitor a tiny, painted Asian bowl that holds pieces of shale she gathered on a Finger Lakes beach more than a decade ago. The bowl sits on her writing desk and was an inspiration during the creation of The Lake of Dreams. “One of the pleasures of writing the book,” she says, “was to be able to dwell in that landscape in my imagination again. It’s very beautiful.”
“I love Memory Keeper’s Daughter, but in some ways I think The Lake of Dreams is a stronger book,” Edwards says. “I was able to tell the story I wanted to tell. That’s all you can ever do as a writer. From there on you have no control over it.”
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