Patchwork Someone: A Memoir

Lying in the emergency room, Jacinta realised it was time to start pulling the fragments of her life back together. Sometimes recovery means letting go. Patchwork Someone is a story about hitting rock bottom and finding the will to get back up again. This book offers an absorbing insight into several worlds -- the Evangelical Church of the turn of the century; Expatriate Hong Kong in the years spanning its handover; a bi-racial, multicultural family; the plight of an overseas student; a fractured mind. It is a tale about a coming of age, and a more tentative kind of faith.
Praise for Patchwork SomeoneA book that needs to exist: hopeful, but the corrective to every story of redemption too tidy and too narrow to hold the actual messiness of life. - Francis Spufford, Golden Hill and Unapologetic.
Patchwork Someone, an unabashedly honest memoir, is both a coming-of-age chronicle and narrative portrait of an expatriate Hong Kong and third-culture world. Jacinta Read's revelatory self-examination does not pull punches. For this Eurasian, rebellious, free-spirited youth - she never quite fit into the privileged, confusingly unmoored and cosmopolitan world of her family and upbringing - her parents' liberal parenting style sent her on a "bumpy ride" of dislocation, wracking her with self-doubt. Her subsequent search for stability through religion and art, and her battle with bipolar disorder contribute to a journey marked by perpetual uncertainty. This is a courageous book by an indomitable spirit who creates her own path for living with uncertainty. A book for both the young (and not-so-young) who must come to terms with who they are, both inside and out. - Xu Xi
'A powerful and funny tale of growing up in Hong Kong, told with charming frankness. Read takes a moment of personal crisis anduses it to spin a tale of life, love in its many forms, and growing up with that sense many of us share, that we are not "normal''.'- Justin Hill, Sunday Times, Washington Post, and The Times Book of the Year
'Patchwork Someone is a fascinating and intimate account of family, faith and love: of struggling to find balance, overcoming obstacles and ultimately, making peace with the unknown.'- Sarah Vallance, Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain
'It is rare for a book from the heart and spirit of a disciple of Christ to tell it like it is, and so penetrate the reader's being like an arrow striking the bull's eye. Jacinta's vivid, passionate and painful memoir is such a