Faced with the grim realities of the 1929 Depression, four hopeful girls treasured their youthful aspirations above all else. They wrote their dearest dreams on small pieces of paper and on Christmas Day, in a cold, candlelit attic, secretly placed them inside a cobalt-blue bottle, vowing to remain friends for life. Sixty-five years later, Brendan Delaney, a local television news reporter, unexpectedly discovers those slips of paper in that dusty, forgotten bottle. She embarks on a passionate quest to interview the now-elderly women and finds that their youthful dreams have been diverted, disrupted, and even devastated. One heart was broken by a fiance's tragic past; another turned toward vows of chastity. A baby was born to an unwed mother; a daughter lost her father to suicide. Like leaves in the wind, the friends' dreams turned and tossed one way, and another. Some vanished forever. But there is a common thread in each of the women's lives, and Brendan thinks she's found it. In following that thread, her life, dreams, and faith become forever intertwined with theirs. On the eve of the Depression, four adolescent girls confide their dreams on paper and commit them to posterity by storing them in a blue bottle in an attic. Sixty-five years later, a jaded female television reporter finds their girlhood wishes and determines to track the women down. While the plot may sound predictable, the protagonists are not; Stokes offers some of the strongest, most appealing women characters ever to appear in evangelical fiction (which is not a genre famous for its three-dimensional females). The novel has a happy ending, but not in the traditional sense of many evangelical novels written for a female audience: no godly heroes come riding in on white horses to rescue these women from poverty, abandonment and despair. Their stories involve broken dreams and betrayed hearts, but speak to an ultimate victory that is centered in God's unconditional love and their lifelong friendships with other women. (Beliefnet, Aug. 2000) -- From Beliefnet The book draws the reader into the lives of the characters and won't let go until the last page -- Courier-Times, Roxboro, NC