Unsettled: A Novel

by Patricia Reis

Overview

Family Secrets. A genealogical quest takes Van back 100 years to the Iowa prairie in search of an ancestor no one has claimed.

As Van Reinhardt clears out her father’s belongings, she comes across a request penned by her father prior to his death. Examining the family portrait of her German immigrant ancestors that he has left her, Van’s curiosity grows about one of the children portrayed there.

Meanwhile in the 1870s, Kate is a German immigrant newly arrived in America with only her brother as family. When she and her brother split, she eventually finds her way back to him, but with a secret.

Van revisits the town and the farm of her ancestors to discover calamitous events in probate records, farm auction lists, asylum records and lurid obituaries, hinting at a history far more complex and tumultuous than she had expected. But the mystery remains, until she changes upon a small book – sized for a pocket – that holds Tante Kate’s secret and provides the missing piece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781736795484
Publisher:	Sibylline Press
Publication date:	10/10/2023
Pages:	363
Sales rank:	551,095
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x (d)

About the Author

Author Patricia Reis is a Midwesterner at heart. In the mid-1800s, her German immigrant ancestors pioneered a farm in southwestern Iowa and their portrait gave her this story. She has lived on both coasts and currently resides in Portland, Maine where she is active in Maine Writers and Publishers. She spends six months of each year in Nova Scotia. Reis holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin, an MFA from UCLA and a degree in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara. She also maintains a private practice of psychotherapy for women. Reis’s memoir, Motherlines: Love, Longing, and Liberation (SheWrites Press, October 2016) won a gold medal for memoir from Independent Press Publishers. Along with numerous essays and reviews, she has published several nonfiction books.

Editorial Reviews

One chapter to the next feels like walking, step by step, into a haunted house. A great read: Once you start, it’s hard to stop. Even when you meet a ghost.” —Michael Lesy, author of Wisconsin Death Trip

“Unsettled is an old-fashioned novel, filled with characters as familiar as family pictures, as touching and as terrifying. Reis writes with assurance about the kinds of secrets that destroyed families generations ago — and maybe still do.” —Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Deep End of the Ocean

“Unsettled is, in many respects, historical fiction at its most rich and most charming. The Reinhardts are gorgeously rendered, the prose intimate and nostalgic, their story prairie gothic at its finest. It paints a conflicted yet complete picture through interwoven points of view and Tante Kate’s journal entries, with best intentions twisted to devastating results and legacies of confusion.” —Stella K. Evans, Reviewer and Commentator

"If Unsettled is unsettling, it’s because it approaches a truth that less talented storytellers avoid: that the most honest storytelling relies on the shadows we fear.

A compelling work that explores the fragility of family history." — Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

Unsettled is an old-fashioned novel, filled with characters as familiar as family pictures, as touching and as terrifying. Reis writes with assurance about the kinds of secrets that destroyed families generations ago — and maybe still do.

Jacquelyn Mitchard

2023-10-10
In Reis’ novel, a history professor finds new clues that shed light on her family’s distant past.

Letty Reinhardt sees a shadow-figure in the Iowa fields outside her house on December 31, 1899. It’s the day before her 44th birthday, for which she’s scheduled a special family portrait, which will take place some distance by buggy from the Reinhardt farm. Her great-granddaughter Evangeline “Van” Reinhardt sees a similar shadow in June 2000, flickering “just outside her peripheral vision” as she tries to finish some family research that her father apparently started before he died. What was he looking for? He never seemed to show any interest in his extended family, his wife, or even Van while he was alive. A sentence on a sticky note on her father’s folder of documents and maps (“Ask Vangie to do some research”) sends her from Madison, Wisconsin, to Maple Grove, Iowa, to look for the human stories behind the haunting, aforementioned family photograph: “Ghosts inhabit empty places…composed of secrets and silences, sufferings and injustices,” Van thinks, and as she digs deeper, her search centers on her grandfather Jacob and his father’s mysterious sister Katharina (“Tante Kate”), who endured multiple tragedies over decades. Over the course of this novel, Reis weaves Tante Kate’s story (and her secrets) with Van’s self-reckoning in a narrative that’s rich with flawed but empathetic characters. The tightly woven narrative reveals how close to the truth one’s guesses about the past can be, and a recurring theme of shadows effectively binds it all together. IfUnsettledis unsettling, it’s because it approaches a truth that less talented storytellers avoid: that the most honest storytelling relies on the shadows we fear.

A compelling work that explores the fragility of family history.

Kirkus Reviews