Meet Regina: The Heart of The Sunstone Path

A Character Profile · March 2026

Regina Lien, as she might have been in the early years on the prairie.

When I first started writing The Unbreakable Anchor, it was meant simply as a gift for my children, something they could hold onto long after I am gone. What I didn’t expect was where it would lead me: deeper into my own history, into the lives of those who came before me, and into a question I hadn’t thought to ask, where does strength really come from?

“She learned early that strength was not something you spoke of, it was something you carried.”

Regina Lien is one of those answers. She is my great-grandmother, a woman I knew only in fragments growing up. My grandmother, Regina’s daughter, rarely spoke about her childhood. What was passed down instead was something quieter—strength, steady and unquestioned.

Regina was born in Jämtland, Sweden, in 1883, near the Norwegian border. In 1902, she made the journey to America with her family, eventually settling on the South Dakota prairie.

The South Dakota prairie is not a gentle place. The winters are punishing, the work is relentless, and the community of Norwegian immigrants around her is held together by faith, stubbornness, and the unspoken agreement that you show up for your neighbors the way you hope they will show up for you.

Regina is woven into all of that. She belongs to this place, even as the place keeps costing her. Regina is not a woman who talks about her feelings easily. She is the person her family turns to. Not because she volunteered, exactly, but because she is simply the one who shows up, and people learn, over time, that she will always show up.

A life shaped by the prairie; quiet, relentless, and enduring.

That quiet reliability is both her greatest strength and, in many ways, her heaviest burden.

But she is not without joy. There is warmth in her, and humor, dry and understated, the way Norwegian humor tends to be. She notices beauty: the particular light on the fields in late afternoon, the way a newborn smells, the sound of her native language spoken by someone who learned it the same way she did, at a mother's knee far from here.

For a long time, Regina existed for me only as a name in a family tree and a few faded photographs. I knew the broad outline of her life. But the woman inside that outline, what she carried, what she feared, how she made sense of the things that happened to her, was lost.

The Sunstone Path is a work of historical fiction rooted in real lives, real places, and real events. It is my way of preserving and honoring a story that might otherwise have been lost.

Regina’s path in this book is not an easy one. I will not say more than that. But I will say that by the time I finished writing the chapters I have written so far, I understood something about her, and about the women in my family, that I had not understood before.

I hope, when you read her story, you come to love her too.

— TJ Nilsdatter