Kim Edwards' The Lake of Dreams is a little bit sleepy novel. The story follows Lucy, a young woman who has escaped the pain of her fathers sudden death by traveling the world and staying far away from her family home in the Finger Lakes region of New York. When she finds herself at a bit of a dead end in her life with her boyfriend in Japan she decides to travel home to The Lake of Dreams (the name of the town she grew up in) after her mother is in a car accident. Here Lucy must confront her past and the fact that everyone in her family has moved on from her father's death but her. Staying in her childhood bedroom, Lucy finds some old letters in a cupboard concerning a ancestor who no one in her family seems to know about. Lucy then embarks on a quest to discover more about this long lost relative - Rose - to uncover her families secrets. Lucy ends up finding a connection between Rose, who participated in the woman's suffrage movement, and a famous stained glass artist from the area - Frank Westrum. A large part of the book focuses on a series of stained glass windows that depict biblical scenes from the women's perspective. Hence, these stained glass cookies which I haven't made or even thought of since I was a kid.
