Rebellion: A Novel

by Molly Patterson

Overview

"Molly Patterson is a writer of the first order, and her debut novel is a revelatory, immersive miracle. Ambitious in scope and exacting in its language, Rebellion becomes a grand exploration of fate and circumstance."—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus

In 1890, a young missionary, Addie, has traveled to the town of Lu-cho Fu with her husband, dreaming of making her mark on the world. But Addie’s desires change after meeting a brash and thoroughly modern woman, Poppy, who offers to transform Addie’s destiny. All the while, letters from Addie reach her sister Louisa back home, recently married and struggling with the quiet isolation of being a farmer’s wife. When violence erupts overseas between the Chinese and their unwelcome Christian intruders, Addie’s life takes a mysterious and haunting turn strongly felt by her sister, Louisa, back home.

By 1958, Louisa’s daughter Hazel is fighting to maintain control of her land and family in the aftermath of her husband’s untimely death. Reeling from the tragedy, she finds herself drawing closer to the neighboring Hughes family and in the process learns that grief takes on many forms.

One hundred years after Addie’s disappearance, Juanlan returns to her hometown with no job and no options. She finds her father ailing and her pregnant sister-in-law restless and angry. While her family and town are rapidly changing, Juanlan feels frozen in place. In search of an outlet for the live wire she feels buried inside, she starts up a love affair with a married man.

Interconnected by action and consequence, each woman’s tale brilliantly displays the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligation of family, and the dramatic consequence of charting your own destiny. A vibrant story of compassion and discovery set against a century of complicated relations between China and America, Rebellion celebrates those who fight against expectation in pursuit of their own thrilling fate, and introduces a rising literary star.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062574053
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	08/28/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Molly Patterson was born in St. Louis and lived in China for several years. The winner of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, she was also the 2012-2013 writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in several magazines, including the Atlantic and the Iowa Review. Rebellion is her first novel.

Editorial Reviews

Patterson’s epic narrative derives its propulsive intimacy from the personal insurrections of four women against their circumstances and expectations…Patterson adroitly zigzags in time, threading the women’s journeys with subtle detail and embellishing them with metaphors specific to each character.” — New York Times Book Review

“[A] super debut… Patterson creates intimate moments that are moving but not manipulative. By not connecting all the dots, she allows her readers to bond more deeply with her characters in this refreshingly unsentimental historical novel.” — BookPage

“A talent to watch, Patterson manages to travel broad swaths of history and geography while creating intimate moments with a refreshing lack of sentimentality; and the novel’s sense of adventure makes it addictive reading.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Read it for…the author’s dazzling ability to capture disparate settings…and to weave together the stories of four strong women.” — BookPage’s Six of the Brightest Names in Fiction

“[A] remarkable debut… This is a book about the quiet unfolding of lives and the kind of rebellion that comes from following one’s heart.” — Booklist

“Molly Patterson is a writer of the first order, and her debut novel is a revelatory, immersive miracle. Ambitious in scope and exacting in its language, Rebellion becomes a grand exploration of fate and circumstance. It becomes its own wondrous universe.” — Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus

“I found Molly Patterson’s Rebellion hypnotically compelling. I was taken by the grand sweep of the story, the simple, direct beauty of the prose, and above all these characters - people I came to know so well. Patterson captures rich, complex lives with great sensitivity and humanity.” — Peter Orner, Author of NBCC Award Finalist, Am I Alone Here? and Love and Shame and Love

“The women who occupy Molly Patterson’s debut novel share a bond that stretches across continents and generations: a desire for more out of life. Rebellion is an epic, electric novel about the large and small ways defiance can transform a person.“ — Michele Filgate, writer and contributing editor at Literary Hub

“Molly Patterson has crafted an immersive tornado of a novel. With equal parts force and intimacy, Rebellion reaches across time and continents to connect the inner lives of four kindred women, each of them at battle with the limitations of their lives. Patterson writes with tremendous attention, the strokes of her words fluent and vivid, and it is a rare pleasure to feel that what we have conjured in our minds is exactly what Patterson intended. Rebellion is a throbbing, visceral saga about the brave acts of women.” — Cecily Wong, author of Diamond Head

From the Publisher

Molly Patterson has crafted an immersive tornado of a novel. With equal parts force and intimacy, Rebellion reaches across time and continents to connect the inner lives of four kindred women, each of them at battle with the limitations of their lives. Patterson writes with tremendous attention, the strokes of her words fluent and vivid, and it is a rare pleasure to feel that what we have conjured in our minds is exactly what Patterson intended. Rebellion is a throbbing, visceral saga about the brave acts of women.

Cecily Wong

[A] remarkable debut… This is a book about the quiet unfolding of lives and the kind of rebellion that comes from following one’s heart.

Booklist

[A] super debut… Patterson creates intimate moments that are moving but not manipulative. By not connecting all the dots, she allows her readers to bond more deeply with her characters in this refreshingly unsentimental historical novel.

BookPage

Patterson’s epic narrative derives its propulsive intimacy from the personal insurrections of four women against their circumstances and expectations…Patterson adroitly zigzags in time, threading the women’s journeys with subtle detail and embellishing them with metaphors specific to each character.

New York Times Book Review

Read it for…the author’s dazzling ability to capture disparate settings…and to weave together the stories of four strong women.

BookPage’s Six of the Brightest Names in Fiction

Molly Patterson is a writer of the first order, and her debut novel is a revelatory, immersive miracle. Ambitious in scope and exacting in its language, Rebellion becomes a grand exploration of fate and circumstance. It becomes its own wondrous universe.

Claire Vaye Watkins

[A] remarkable debut… This is a book about the quiet unfolding of lives and the kind of rebellion that comes from following one’s heart.

Booklist

06/19/2017
Three strong women and their acts of rebellion in disparate circumstances are intriguingly connected in this vividly rendered, impressive debut. Addie, an American missionary in China in the latter part of the 19th century, leaves her husband and children and the confines of a restrictive enclave to venture into the more remote parts of the country with a widowed missionary with whom she has become enamored. Addie’s niece, Hazel, whom we first meet as a feisty senior in 1999, driving the car that her adult children took the keys from, has had a tough life since she became the widowed mother of two children in the 1950s. She asserts her independence by maintaining ownership of her farm and unexpectedly develops an illicit relationship with her neighbor’s husband, while maintaining a connection to the man’s wife. Juanlan, a 1998 college graduate with no job prospects, returns to the small Chinese town where she was born to help with the family-owned hotel. She ends up having an affair with a married, politically connected older man whom her brother introduces her to with the hope that he will give their parents official permission to open up their hotel to foreigners. We see each woman interacting with family and friends, navigating the diverse challenges she faces, achieving a hard-won sense of self worth. Most remarkable is the subtle way Patterson ties all three lives together. Agent: Ellen Levine and Alexa Stark, Trident Media Group. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

The women who occupy Molly Patterson’s debut novel share a bond that stretches across continents and generations: a desire for more out of life. Rebellion is an epic, electric novel about the large and small ways defiance can transform a person.“

Michele Filgate

I found Molly Patterson’s Rebellion hypnotically compelling. I was taken by the grand sweep of the story, the simple, direct beauty of the prose, and above all these characters - people I came to know so well. Patterson captures rich, complex lives with great sensitivity and humanity.

Peter Orner

Read it for…the author’s dazzling ability to capture disparate settings…and to weave together the stories of four strong women.

BookPage's Six of the Brightest Names in Fiction

Patterson has a gift for fluid storytelling and evocative prose. Each section of the book pulls the reader forward with a need to understand the connections between the story lines and the resolutions of the conflicts… The women in this deeply layered and skillfully narrated novel must rebel against who they are supposed to be, only then discovering who they actually are.

Colorado Review

As with the characters of Flaubert and Chopin, Patterson’s women don’t always act in ways that are socially acceptable. In the hands of a lesser writer, these defiant acts might appear disreputable, but in Patterson’s hands how Hazel and Addie and Juanlan respond to the live wires inside them makes you think: Yeah, she had to do that. Good for her...This is a beautiful book — fast-moving, sensuous, vividly detailed.” 

Star Tribune

★ 04/15/2017
Four women and the paths they take at crucial times in their lives are explored in this intergenerational novel that covers two continents. Addie, a young, idealistic missionary in China, embarks on a dramatic turn from taking care of her husband and children and accompanies Poppy to a mission hundreds of miles away. On an Illinois farm, Hazel prematurely loses her husband and carries on an affair with her best friend's husband. Louisa, Addie's sister, is very concerned when she reads about the Boxer Rebellion in China and the murder of Christians. Juanlan, in present-day China, conducts an affair with a high-ranking government official while deciding what to do after college. In precise, detailed language we experience the beginning of a life; the slow defeat that cancer brings; a sudden, tragic death; and the awakening of the soul in these flesh-and-bone characters. VERDICT The Pushcart Prize-winning Patterson has written quite a debut, truly a page-turner that shows her knowledge of life in China. She's a natural storyteller with empathy for the plight of women, and book groups will have much to discuss with this sweeping, far-flung novel. [See Prepub Alert, 2/20/17.]—Lisa Rohrbaugh, Leetonia Community P.L., OH

Library Journal

★ 2017-05-15
Patterson's debut novel sprawls across decades and continents, from the American heartland to the far reaches of China, to follow the lives of four women—some related more closely than others—who remake themselves as circumstances allow or require.When 84-year-old Hazel goes into a nursing home in 1999, her children arrive to close up her farmhouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, and find relics of a past they can't fully understand. Abruptly the story shifts to Illinois in the 1890s, as Hazel's mother, Louisa, who has moved from Ohio to farm with her husband, receives letters from her sister Addie, who's living what seems to Louisa an exotic life in China with her missionary husband, Owen, and two sons. Another abrupt shift takes readers to 1998 China as recent college graduate Juanlan reluctantly returns to her provincial hometown to help her parents run their small hotel. While Louisa settles into a mostly contented life, the stories of Hazel, her aunt Addie, and Juanlan, whose physical connection to the others is slim at best, follow a similar thematic arc. Each recognizes that she may have more than one identity, each shrugs off passivity to take control of her life, and each is influenced by a deep relationship with another woman as she falls into an unexpected love affair. Respected widow Hazel carries on a long, secret love affair with her best friend's husband; dutiful daughter Juanlan forges a bond with her rebellious, pregnant sister-in-law while finding herself attracted to several different men; and most dramatically, Addie abandons her family to travel across China beside a woman missionary with whom she's fallen in love. Despite minor quibbles—at times Patterson gets stuck in the weeds of daily minutiae, and outlier Louisa, satisfied in her quiet life, remains undeveloped—Hazel's, Juanlan's, and Addie's stories could each stand alone as an involving novel. A talent to watch, Patterson manages to travel broad swaths of history and geography while creating intimate moments with a refreshing lack of sentimentality; and the novel's sense of adventure makes it addictive reading.

Kirkus Reviews