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About Patricia Reis

Author Patricia Reis is the author of the newly released work of historic fiction, Unsettled. She is a Midwesterner at heart. In the mid-1800s, her German immigrant ancestors pioneered a farm in southwestern Iowa and their portrait gave her the idea for the novel. 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. Unsettled is Reis’ first work of fiction.

Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Deep End of the Ocean, wrote this about Unsettled:

“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.”

Michael Lesy, author of
Wisconsin Death Trip, said:

“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.”

HISTORICAL FICTION | $19
Trade Paper | 5.315” x 8.465”

ISBN: 978-1-7367954-8-4
Pub Date: 10/10/2023

Unsettled: A Novel

By Patricia Reis

Get it wherever great books are sold

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 chances upon a small book—sized for a pocket—that holds Tante Kate’s secret and provides the missing piece.