We drift along slowly to sweet, sweet vengeance. The main character, Winnie, isn’t very likable and just feels sorry for herself, but ultimately the book isn’t really about her. She’s a tiny piece of the bigger story.

There were a few parts that terrified me and kept me awake until 2am, but I’m also a pansy when it comes to things that go bump in the night.

My expectations of Build Your House Around My Body being about Vietnamese folklore, historical fiction, anticolonism were a little discordant with the actual book. Yes, it did contain that to some degree but it was more action packed and contained more horror and supernatural elements, and sleaze on the streets of modern Saigon.

There's an emphasis on 'halfies' or biracials, such as protagonist Winnie who was born and raised in the United States with an Italian + Irish blend mother and a Vietnamese father. Her father, who was a refugee in the US, met her mother when she volunteered at the refugee camp teaching English. Like many teaching English in Vietnam and other Asian countries, she is there to escape her own life. Other foreigner teachers at her Achievement! Academy are there to have their 'unique' life experience, sleep with local Vietnamese women, 'find themselves' and run a travel blog. On the surface, Winnie or Ngoan Nguyen seems like an anguished lost young woman because she doesn't fit in her family and doesn't have an identity to hang her hat on. Her much older brothers are golden penises who have fulfilled their parents' dream occupations - doctor, engineer, lawyer - and dutifully followed the sheeple lifescript, picket fence married breeder to 2.5 squalling kids. Winnie's aversion to this and her family's well-intentioned concern is quite clear.

Through Winnie and two local Vietnamese brothers Tan and Long she gets involved with + creepy Dr Sang, we are plunged into the seedy squalid underbelly of Saigon, with KTV bars lounges, date rape, drugs, pills, sex in toilets, animal smuggling, human trafficking, tourist scams, corrupt police. Ms Kupersmith's descriptions of the humidity, crowding, gnarled clogged streets, motorbikes and motor taxis, street food vendors, stray dogs makes us feel like we're there in person.

Woven through this contemporary time line in 2010 are a few others involving the rural Vietnamese highlands of Ia Kare, a site where two Frenchmen decided to start a rubber plantation in 1942 which later was burnt down and where childhood friends Binh and brothers Tan and Long grew up in the nineties, being juvenile cemetery extortionists in 1993. The illustrations of Ia Kare then and now and the maps are excellent. Also important is Jean-François Auffrett, another mixed 'Metis' with French mother and Vietnamese father, who gets left behind by the French missionaries in 1942 in Lang Biang Mountain of Dalat and gets possessed by sentient smoke/fire. He makes a reappearance in modern times as an exorcist and Fortune Teller.

The horror/supernatural genre is not what I normally read and here there's plentiful ghosts, hauntings, possession by spirits of humans and animals, nebulous sentient smoke or fire causing mandible to stretch and hang, woman in wedding dress hawking up big ball of black hair, the sex conquest book of hairs, Binh who reappears as all hair - do not read at night! Certain themes recur - fire, smoke, hair, snakes, cobras in particular a two-headed one! The pieces do fit together snugly, I appreciate the author giving us space to pierce together links and clues like the leather briefcase with initials JAF, the sites at which cobras are released in modern Saigon and reappearance of Second Assistant (Hai) and JAF himself.

The snakes and cobras are not the scary ones, in fact they treat the women tenderly and give them their means of revenge. Some of the snakes themselves become prisoners in a zoo vivarium. Men and their lust and violence is the common link between the three women Winnie, Binh and Miss Ma who have disappeared across different timelines. Sexual assault, violence inflicted on female bodies, exploitation of women, femicide is a problem throughout the world today and more attention is always good. I felt that it took awhile to focus on this point and although it's the climax, too many distractions of the superstitions and horror elements detracted. Too much flash and not enough authentic Vietnam. Even the snakes which are front and centre on the cover and story, I still don't understand their connection to Vietnamese folklore. As well, Ms Kupersmith may well have done a disservice to Asians in talking about Vietnamese and Chinese eating cats, dogs, embryonic duck etc., giving Western bigots and ignorant racists another inlet when the majority of Asians do not consume anything remotely close to that in their entire lives.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

I went into this blindly, and I would highly recommend that. I never knew where the story was going next, and it was a thrilling ride!
There are so many histories entwined into the story, but it was masterly done and easy to keep track of.
I’m not sure what genre to put it in, but historical fiction, mystery, literary fiction all seem to fit, but they don’t quite describe it correctly.
It was a different kind of novel for me, and I’m glad I dived in.

Spirits, Snakes, and Secrets!

The premise of the novel proffers a mystery surrounding the disappearance of two girls decades apart to entice the reader into thinking that maybe this is a classic ‘whodunit’ or something similar; however, it did not take long for my expectations to be exceeded in a surprisingly good way.

Meet Ngoan aka “Winnie,” a young woman who is running (literally to the other side of the world) to disappear. She is the underachieving youngest child in a family of overachievers who also struggles with her biracial identity -- not “American/White” enough for her Caucasian peers, not “Asian/Vietnamese” enough for her Asian peers, and crumbles under the weight of daily microaggressions and negative stereotypes. Via flashbacks scattered throughout the novel, we learn of her lifelong battles with assimilation, body image, romantic encounters/failures/fetishes, and sibling rivalry -- all of which contributes to her decision to relocate to Vietnam to work as an English as a Second Language teacher -- only she’s not proficient in Vietnamese! She is too young and naive to realize that “wherever you go, you take yourself;” thus it is no surprise when things continue to go downhill as soon as she arrives.

Winnie’s adventures in Saigon lead to seemingly random encounters with individuals who we eventually discover have entangled histories going back decades. The influence and legacy of French colonization is blended into the political and socio-economic aspects of the novel that adds realism to this fantastical tale stock full of regional myths and folklore. Some of the characters are quite eccentric, but even the most conventional have wonderfully imagined (sometimes mystical and convoluted) backstories -- we meet ‘do-gooder’ ex-pats, nefarious gangsters, fortune tellers, and those possessed by otherworldly spirits.

I was fully immersed into this world and reveled in the author’s handling of the time sequences as well as the intricate, intertwined relationships of the characters -- it alluded to a “six degrees of separation” vibe and garnered several satisfying “a-ha” moments whenever the proverbial “dots” connected.

Recommended to those who appreciate Vietnamese folklore, a drizzle of historical fiction, a smattering of magical realism, a bit of haunting via dreams, and a sprinkle of astral projections.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for allowing me access to this book. Best of luck to Violet Kupersmith with her literary career.

This book review will be posted on NetGalley, NCBC’s blog, and Goodreads.

Snake symbolism, the supernatural, and seemingly semi-mad people appear throughout this novel set in modern day Vietnam. If I have read in the past a book more masterly plotted than Build Your House Around My Body, I frankly can’t remember it. As the story winds it’s way back and forth through the years and the different characters, you have “Aha!” moments as you put the pieces together. I would like to thank Random House for allowing me this early read of a story set in a place that was once very much in the daily consciousness and now relegated by most to the pages of history.

I loved her story collection and thought it showed immense talent. I could not really get into this book though but wonder if it's me. The giftedness is there, but there was a kind of switching between styles in the sense of "commercial suspense" vs. "literary fiction" and for me this made the book harder to be completely absorbed by. I would give this a second read though because of just how talented this writer is. And I may very well be underestimating its power. I did like the opening images of disturbed sleep - those do linger.

This strange and darkly humorous book grabbed me at the beginning and didn't let go. It centers around the disappearance of Winnie, and Vietnamese-American in her 20's who moved to Saigon to teach English. As the story progresses, and characters are introduced and developed, the story moves across time and through the eyes of various people involved. You meet three children at different points in their lives and relationship to each other, a family in rural Vietnam, and the present day staff of the English school where Winnie works. All of it combines into a darkly fantastical tale, lush with the jungle and dirty with modern Saigon, as Winnie is searching for her place and her identity. Magic, humor, and heartbreak abound, as the disappearance becomes known at the end. A bit unsettling, but full of unique magic, the loss and heartbreak of a people at war, mistakes that can't be undone, and the growing up we all are forced to do.

A young woman looking for her place in the world takes a teaching job in Vietnam and stumbles into a weird weird world of snakes and possessions.