It’s 1878. Mrs. Peale has been dead for 38 years and Ambleside is a new Italianate house on the Kansas prairie town of Newton when her existential yelp sparks the beginning of an unforgettable relationship.
We, the House begins in a frontier town where a battered Civil War Union veteran builds his new wife her dream house, an Italianate glory she names Ambleside. Soon an early American portrait of Mrs. Simon Peale arrives from Hartford, Connecticut to dignify the dining room wall. When the portrait’s existential yelp causes house and painting to discover each other, Ambleside is a perfect ‘tabula rasa,’ almost literally born yesterday, and Mrs. Peale a devastated young widow, a starchy professor of Latin, who has been dead since 1841.
Book may be ordered from Blue Cedar Press, Gretchen Eick, Wichita, Kansas eickgc@gmail.com phone: (316) 682-8818 or (316) 250-0379; Alibris.com; Amazon.com; Barnes & Noble; any local bookstore.
