Book Review: ‘The Remnants of Rebellion’ by Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew

Book Title: The Remnants of Rebellion: A Novel
Author: Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Number of Pages: 320
ISBN: 978-9365237771
Date Published: Jul. 1, 2025
Price: INR 656

Book Review

There’s something electric about a debut novel that doesn’t hesitate to bite into memory, legacy, and love with equal sharpness—and “The Remnants of Rebellion: A Novel” does just that. Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew delivers a story as unpredictable as it is unforgettable. Centered on Aleyamma, an artist who returns to her family’s hilltop estate in Kerala after her grandfather’s death, the novel takes the form of an emotional excavation. What begins as a reluctant inheritance spirals into a richly layered confrontation with the ghosts—literal and metaphorical—that linger in the blood-red soil and teak-lined corridors of her ancestral home.

Author Mathew writes with the rhythm of someone who knows that humour and heartbreak aren’t opposites but companions. Her sentences swing between sly and searing. Velia Pappa and Cheria Pappa, with their Elvis obsessions and secret insecurities, feel at once absurd and painfully real. But what appears, on the surface, to be an eccentric family saga is actually a deeper reckoning with how caste, gender, faith, and colonial hangovers shape the idea of home—and who gets to claim it. The novel’s portrayal of Syrian Christian identity is particularly incisive, peeling back layers of pious myth-making to expose something much rawer underneath.

There is no single genre that can contain “The Remnants of Rebellion“. It is at once a gothic inheritance tale, a political history, and a personal meditation on grief and belonging. Author Mathew stitches Kerala’s local histories—including the Mopilla Rebellion and the forgotten violence of the Wagon Tragedy—into the lives of her characters with care and complexity. The estate itself becomes a character: creaking, beautiful, and heavy with both colonial residue and familial resentment. Every room Aleyamma enters seems to breathe with memory and refusal.

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To call this book merely “promising” would be an understatement. It’s the kind of novel that rearranges you. With boldness and brilliance, Ponnu Elizabeth Mathew reclaims the family saga for a new generation—one that isn’t content to romanticize the past, but insists on confronting it. This is a rebellion worth remembering.

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