The Settee

About the Book

The beginning of this story takes place in pre-WWII Germany, in a small village a few miles from Berlin.  Conditions are briefly described under which the Settee is constructed and why and by whom.  After several years have passed, the missing piece of furniture is being sought by the maker as a link to his destroyed past.  This search eventually leads him to America, specifically to a cousin in Boston and then on into the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts.  It is here that a Career Army family, recently returned from assignment in occupied Germany, lives and unknown to all, the wife had purchased the quaint piece of furniture and it had been included with their personal goods then transferred to the family home in Richmond, Massachusetts.

After a short time, the creator of the SETTEE, innocently finds himself drawn into a branch of this family because of his skills as a carpenter and woodworker.  There he finds an unexpected second chance at life and love.  Through this revelation he not only finds his only solid link to his past, but he finds a place to live out his life in security with a love he never sought, but desperately needed to help heal old wounds.

After the sudden death of the career Army man in Korea, his widow meets his heretofore, never-mentioned elderly aunts from the southern shores of Connecticut along Long Island Sound.  It's not long before the struggling, single mother of two young daughters and very active little boy is caught up in finding out about that part of her deceased husband's family through a new friendship with a dear aunt.  Caught up in the whirlwind of family intrigue, wealth and her growing children, Maddie decides to accept Aunt Martha's lovingly offered invitation to move into the family mansion, Rockland.  Believing that her feelings of love can never be reciprocated, she reluctantly agrees to give the move a try, for the sake of her children.  The whirlwind becomes a maelstrom which is about to test her strength as a mother and a lonely young woman.  It seemed to her that every door and room of that new home reopened another Pandora's box of questions and adventures for all concerned.  Who was Camille?  Amillya?  Everett?  So many names she had never heard of before.  She didn't feel afraid of them because she was well aware that they were dead.  It was the ones who were still alive that caused her to lie awake at night in her lonely bed, listening to the chiming of each hour from the huge, carved clock standing in the cavernous hallway of the great, gray stone mansion.  It had stood like a sentinel and witness to all that had gone on there all these many years.  She was well aware, also, that she wouldn't rest peacefully until she knew it all, no matter how long it took.

Now, my dear readers, the question I ask is . . . are YOU ready for the journey to find the answers for yourselves?  It may well take more than one book to tell it all. . . .

About the Author

Author, Lois E. LaRouche, nee, Campbell, is a native of the Berkshire Hills in Northwestern Massachusetts. Now, she and her husband of thirty-eight years, Richard, and some of her other family members are twenty-one-year residents of Westminster, Colorado. She began to write late in life and completed THE SETTEE several years ago.