Part memoir, part social and cultural history, part ecological exploration, Prairie Reunion takes writer Barbara Scot to Scotch Grove, Iowa, the small farming community of her childhood where she succeeds in coming to terms with her parents' legacy, a bittersweet history that involves love, abandonment, and suicide.

In 1943, Scot's mother, a young Iowa farm wife, was deserted by her husband. He left behind two small children and a mountain of debts. Through the poetry of Scot's description, the prairie setting in which her parents' tragedy unfolded provides a majestic backdrop for a journey through family, place, and time. With exquisite tenderness and insight, Scot relives her childhood.

She re-evaluates her parents' lives in the light of her own experience, and in light of the community's religious and social history, and in terms of the land itself. With modesty and grace, Prairie Reunion tells a universal story of age-old heartache and how that heartache can be assuaged and absorbed into a living present. It is a work of enormous power and resonance that will speak hauntingly to every daughter and son.