About
In this lyrical historical fiction with
alternating points of view, a repressed woman begins an ancestral quest through
the prairies of Iowa, awakening family secrets and herself, while in the late
1800s, a repressed ancestor, Tante Kate, creates those secrets.
As Van Reinhardt clears out her dead father's belongings, she comes across
hints of an unsettling family history, along with a request penned by her
father prior to his death that sends her on a genealogical quest. Examining a
1900 family portrait of her German immigrant ancestors, Van curiosity grows
about one of the children portrayed there.
In the 1870s,
Kate is a German immigrant newly arrived in America with only her brother as
family. Life changes for Kate when she and her brother split. When she returns,
armed with a secret, nothing is the same, for her or her brother. Together they
try to forge a life working for farmers in southwestern Iowa and at Kate's
urging, her brother takes the farmer's daughter as his wife. And as that family
grows, Kate becomes Tante Kate, isolated and separate from the rest of the
family-almost a servant-not even appearing in the family portrait.
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 chances upon a small book, sized for a pocket-Tante Kate's
secret diary-that provides the missing piece.
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 chances upon a small book, sized for a pocket-Tante Kate's
secret diary-that provides the missing piece. Unsettled delivers what DNA
analysis and Ancestry.com cannot.
Using memory,
imagination and heart, Van constructs her ancestral narrative, uncovers the
secrets that have kept her from the truth, mending the tears in her family
story and her own life.