Steven D Fortney

The Reunion Steven D Fortney

The Reunion is the story of several generations of a large Norwegian-American farm family. Many plot strands are interwoven with a description of a huge reunion at the ancestral farm in west-central Wisconsin in 1983. The cousins share a range of backgrounds from farming to big business to nuclear physics to military veterans from WWI to Vietnam . Be warned: the last section of chapter four, titled "1968" is a harrowing tearful ride. Nonetheless, a scene near the end of the novel finds the narrator climbing a hill overlooking a valley where generations of his family have farmed and gone to school. And there, making a simple, life-affirming gesture, he has an experience that lifts him out of his human limitedness into a deep love for the earth, his connectedness to it, and the transcendence of the sorrows of his family.