Name: BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY.
Rating: 4.083333333333333 (18 reviews)
ISBN: 9780861542147

VIOLET. KUPERSMITH

BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY.

Rachel ✨

Violet Kupersmith

Feverishly energetic and playfully creepy, an unforgettable debut that hurtles through the ghostly secrets of Vietnamese history

Build Your House Around My Body

Wonko the Sane

Don’t believe the blurb. It sets you up to expect something that this book doesn’t deliver, and doesn’t prepare you for what it does deliver, which is so much weirder.

It took me a long time to read this (10 days) and in the end I’m not really sure it was worth it. Violet Kupersmith can write, but I think this debut possibly had too many threads and connections to keep track of. First novel syndrome: too many ideas.

Edited to add: also, this is petty af, but the paperback edition of this book published by Oneworld is just unpleasant to handle. The pages make a really unpleasant creak that was like nails on a chalkboard to me. If you’re planning to try it, I’d suggest getting a digital copy.

"In 1986, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience. In 2009, pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra. And in 2011, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend, disappears without a trace. Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock together in an exhilarating series of nested narratives. Along the way, we meet a young boy sent to a boarding school in the mountains for the métis children of French expatriates just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule in 1945; two Frenchmen trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., called to investigate strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds the three women together, and what happened to Winnie. Written with wit, ambition, and playfulness, this book takes us from sweaty nightclubs to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions to ex-pat flats, sizzling back-alley street carts to the noisy seats of motorbikes. Spanning over fifty years and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a fever dream about possessed bodies and possessed lands, a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing marvel of a novel"--

A Novel

The best kind of ghost story. Real sense of place. I couldn’t stop reading. 

Pavonini

Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this kaleidoscopic novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into a “brilliant, sweeping epic that swaps spirits and sheds time like snakeskin” (Paul Tremblay, author of A Head Full of Ghosts and Survivor Song). Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge. 1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed. 2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all. Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last page.

BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY.

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