Dreams, aspirations, goals—we all have them—and I believe they never die. Sometimes they fade away, and sometimes in our hectic ‘got-to-make-a-living’ life style, they get parked on a side street in another state.
Goals and dreams take lots of forms for lots of different people. I have a friend whose dream is to have a washer and dryer in her apartment and not have to schlep down two flights of stairs to do her laundry. Yet another friend, dreams of having Cyrstal Bowersox win American Idol and for Lost to finally reveal all the answers to her long-awaited questions. Different strokes… For me I dream of having a year to explore Europe, with all the time in the world to visit the great museums, go to the theater, eat decadent food, and shop at little antique stores.
Having a dream is a funny thing. As our lives get busier and our responsibilities heavier, sometimes our dreams get compromised or forgotten altogether. Maybe that’s why I enjoy a book that highlights a protagonist that goes after their dreams. It always renews and invigorates me and in some small way reassures me that dreams do (eventually) come true.
For Annie Coldwater in Kristin Hannah’s On Mystic Lake, her dreams were put on hold while she raised her daughter and helped her husband become a successful, powerful, and wealthy lawyer. After two decades of devotion, Annie’s left with an empty but sleek Malibu Beach home, a closet full of designer clothes and some regrets. When Annie’s husband leaves her for a younger woman, she decides it's time to go back home to her father, figure her life out, and remember that she once had dreams. As a young girl in Mystic she wanted to open a bookstore, as a wife she’d wanted to be a writer.
Make no mistake: Annie doesn’t suddenly arrive at Mystic Lake, have a revelation, change her life and live happily ever after. No such luck. She’s got some soul searching to do and decisions to make. And like many dreams deferred, it is not easily picked up after twenty years. Wouldn’t we all love a scenario where we have a revelation and plant ourselves firmly on the path of pursuing our dreams—cue the music to a swelling crescendo, slow motion montage of beautiful images where everything falls into place, and a final frame of the sun rising over the mountains. But life isn’t like that, there is no pause or rewind button and you get no time out for station identification. All the ‘stuff’ that goes on between the revelation and achieving our dreams is life—from the mundane to the prophetic and everything in between. And it’s the same with Annie.
On Mystic Lake is an emotional story that looks at the lives of three broken people and how they’ve reached the bottom in order to discover that dreams never die, that in fact they can be revived and you can live out loud. Living your dream however small or large is what we all strive for.
Come on people, share. What’s the burning dream on your to do list?
Maria Lokken is an avid romance reader and an award winning television producer.
