UNSETTLED

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.