Build Your House Around My Body

Paperback

Published by Oneworld Publication.

ISBN:
978-0-86154-214-7
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5 stars (2 reviews)

Two young Vietnamese 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 gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father, and is forever changed by the experience.

2011: Twenty-five years later, a young, unhappy Vietnamese-American named Winnie disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.

The fates of both women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Barrelling through the sweaty nightclubs of Saigon to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions and haunted forests, Violet Kupersmith's heart-pounding fever dream of a novel deftly combines Vietnamese history and folklore to create an immersive, playful, utterly unforgettable debut.

4 editions

Review of 'Build Your House Around My Body' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Loved this! So good. I would put this in a category I’m going to call “readable.” It’s engaging, accessibly written, and twisty. A very high quality version of that kind of story.

It is still quite a complex read what with all the different time periods and characters. I got to the end still feeling muddled because there are a lot of threads that come together. But not in such a way that I think the story is flawed - more that it would reward a reread. I think it was all revealed to the reader kind of perfectly.

The horror elements worked really well for me. I found a lot of the imagery unsettling and creepy. I also really enjoyed the magical realism or fantastical bits. I think this could be adapted to film so well.

The themes of the story mostly revolve around feminism and Vietnamese identity. …