We, the House

We, the House begins in 1878 in the frontier town of Newton on the Kansas prairie. There a battered Civil War Union veteran builds his new wife her dream house, an Italianate glory she names Ambleside who tells this story. Soon an early American portrait of Mrs. Simon Peale arrives from Hartford, Connecticut to dignify the dining room wall. She can hear and see what goes on inside the house. He can see what occurs outside. Each is isolated and alone until 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 is a devastated young widow, a starchy professor of Latin, who has been dead since 1841. She is eager to teach and Ambleside is an avid learner. Together over 130 years, through the lives and generations of 'their' family, the two works of art witness and try to comprehend the panorama of American social history-from women's suffrage, three wars, the ice box, photography, and the invention of the two-by-four, to indoor plumbing and electrification, the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and Dachau, foxglove, the Love That Dare Not Speak its Name, the song of the catbird, and Little Women. Over the decades, a most unusual love develops between them and quietly deepens, until one day in 2010 an art historian from New York happens to see the portrait of Mrs. Peale and, abruptly, everything changes.

Author: Warren Ashworth, Susan Kander
Publisher: Blue Cedar Press
Published: 10/12/2021
Pages: 206
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.68lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.47d
ISBN: 9781736911259


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 01/01/0001

About the Author
Ashworth, Warren: - Warren Ashworth is an architect known particularly for restaurant design in New York and Chicago. He is an instructor of design and of architectural history at the New York School of Interior Design, with a special passion for American wood-framed architecture, of which our protagonist is a glowing example. He is also the editor of a biannual scholarly journal of design and material culture called Nineteenth Century, published by the Victorian Society in America. He has worked framing houses, restoring historic houses, and along with Susan, building a timber-framed structure for their son's wedding with the same nineteenth-century tools Simon Peale would have used.Kander, Susan: - Susan Kander is a composer whose music has been heard across the United States and in Europe, China, Australia and South Africa. She received her BA in Music at Harvard, then side-stepped into fifteen years as a playwright before coming home to composition in the 1990s. Her music publisher is Subito Music Corp. She is a Fellow of the MacDowell Colony. Warren and Susan live in a brownstone in New York City where, starting many years ago, they raised two fine boys.

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