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Brimming with atmosphere and edgy suspense, The Rebel Wife presents a young widow trying to survive in the violent world of Reconstruction Alabama, where the old gentility masks a continuing war fueled by hatred, treachery, and still-powerful secrets.
Augusta Branson was born into antebellum Southern nobility during a time of wealth and prosperity, but now all that is gone, and she is left standing in the ashes of a broken civilization. When her scalawag husband dies suddenly of a mysterious blood plague, she must fend for herself and her young son. Slowly she begins to wake to the reality of her new life: her social standing is stained by her marriage; she is alone and unprotected in a community that is being destroyed by racial prejudice and violence; the fortune she thought she would inherit does not exist; and the deadly blood fever is spreading fast. Nothing is as she believed, everyone she knows is hiding something, and Augusta needs someone to trust. Somehow she must find the truth amid her own illusions about the past and the courage to cross the boundaries of hate, so strong, dangerous, and very close to home. Using the Southern Gothic tradition to explode literary archetypes like the chivalrous Southern gentleman, the good mammy, and the defenseless Southern belle, The Rebel Wife shatters the myths that still cling to the antebellum South and creates an unforgettable heroine for our time.
"A richly detailed portrait of Reconstruction-era Alabama... Nimble, engrossing... builds to a vivid climax." - Publishers Weekly
"This feverishly static tale offers obvious lessons in sin and freedom." - Kirkus Reviews
"The suspense is exquisitely honed... pulled back just in time to make for a wonderfully chilling - yet over-heated - read." - Booklist
"This is a wonderful first novel - passionate and brave. It removes the skin of an era, and questions so many of the tropes that hover around 19th century southern American literature. It was Faulkner who, in the 20th century, talked about the voice of fiction being inexhaustible. Taylor Polites has extended our narrative reach into yet another time. A fascinating, genre-subverting historical novel." - Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
"Taylor Polites's The Rebel Wife is the love child of William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell, and sister to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper." A gripping look at Reconstruction-era Alabama through the mind of one flawed, desperate woman." - Lenore Hart, author of The Raven's Bride and Becky
This information about The Rebel Wife was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Taylor M. Polites received an MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University, where he was awarded the 2009 Norris Church Mailer Scholarship. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Visit him online at www.taylormpolites.com.
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