I really enjoyed reading this novel of a family’s experience as settlers in the Midwest and the secrets that got passed down through generations. I loved the main character, an independent, women’s studies researcher, who is searching a bit for herself as she searches for clues to her family’s history by using a photo and information that her recently deceased father left for her. The story toggles in time and you get to know the story of those in the picture and what lay behind their seemingly placid façades. “Aunt Kate” provides an interesting parallel to Van and their stories highlight the role of women in the family and in our society, both now and in the past.

Here’s the 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.

A big thank you to my friends at Sibylline Press (who publishes “brilliant women over 50”) for sending me this one!

Here’s some info on the author – who is having her fiction debut with this novel!

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.