This is a lovely book that treats the past as more than memory, but as a deep current that tugs at the lives of its present day characters, even though they are unaware of its secrets. The Lake of Dreams is a (fictional) place in the finger lakes district of New York where the main character Lucy Jarrett was raised and where her family's roots are since the time her great grandfather emigrated there and established the family lock business. Lucy grew up on the shores of the beautiful deep cold lake, but left home for college after the accidental drowning death of her father and tried to escape her pain and feelings of guilt by traveling far and wide in her career as a hydrologist. Even in her chosen livelihood, she cannot escape the pull of water. Her life is on shaky ground, metaphorically and literally, for as the book opens she is unemployed, living with her lover in Japan, where earthquakes are a frequent occurrence, the result of an island forming underwater. When her mother is injured in a car accident, Lucy decides it's time to visit home, a place she has mostly avoided in the last ten years. Lucy has the family gift of opening locks, and in the closed-off cupola of her childhood home she unlocks a window seat and finds some old papers relating to the suffragettes, a letter, and a personal note tucked in the articles. (One minor quibble: the author doesn't explain how this personal revealing note or the inflammatory papers it was hidden in could have ended up there when the writer had never lived in the house.) In her discovery Lucy has unlocked a window to the past, which leads her to actual windows of stained glass that are connected to the writer of the letter and note. Lucy's quest to unravel the mystery of her heretofore unknown relative drives most of the narrative. In her search she unearths truths that shake the foundation of her family's carefully constructed edifice, like an underwater island, and lead her to a confrontation that reveals the painful circumstances of her father's death. There are several themes here - the suffering and redemption of the past, the struggle for the rights of women, the healing power of art, the protection and restoration of land and water, and the search for a spiritual peace, like the calm of a deep, placid lake. I found the book to have a gentle lull, like rocking in a boat on the water, but one that you still feel after you're back on land.