Unsettled

Unsettledicon

by Patricia Reis

Publisher
Sibylline Press
Publication
Oct 10, 2023
Format
Paperback/Softback
Illustrated
No
Price
$14.50
Dimensions
5.25 x 8.5 x 1 in
ISBN
978-1736795484
ASIN
1736795481
Pages
363
Age
Adult 18+

Rights Sold

🌍 World Wide Rights Available

Description

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.

Awards & Endorsements

Review

“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

Kirkus Reviews
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. 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.

Author(s)

Patricia Reis

Patricia Reis

Patricia Reis is passionately interested in how creativity, depth psychology, and the natural world inform a woman’s spiritual life. Her new gold medal winning memoir, Motherlines, weaves these threads on the warp of a midlife passage.

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