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Build Your Home Around My Body
Build Your Home Around My Body
Violet Kupersmith | 2021 | Fiction & Poetry, Horror, Science Fiction/Fantasy
8
8.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I loved this enchanting, horrific, beautiful story. Build Your House Around My Body is a difficult book to describe. There are at least three timelines, all relevant to what is happening in the present day to the main character, Winnie née Ngoan.

Winnie is a lost soul - she has gone to Vietnam to stay with family while she teaches English to Vietnamese students, hoping to find herself, but she seems to become more and more lost as the story progresses. She struggles with her dual identity as her mother is American, and her father is Vietnamese. The fact that she seems to deliberately sabotage her own life is the most tragic thing about her.

The time does jump around a bit, but this didn’t confuse me at all - the chapter headings made sure of that - in fact they gave some interesting history lessons (e.g. French colonialism, Japanese occupation).

It’s a weird and wonderful one (my favourite kind!), sometimes bordering on the grotesque (ditto). Bodily functions and food that I wasn’t sure about, galore! (I’d still try the food though, although I draw the line at dog…).

The supernatural elements showed that these things are still very much a part of Vietnamese culture (spirits and demons both feature).

Some parts are achingly sad, some made me feel a bit ill, and others were actually quite amusing. I couldn’t put this book down. The joy of it was that I didn’t know, couldn’t predict, what was going to happen next!

I’m really interested to see what Kupersmith writes next if this is her debut - what an imagination!
Many thanks to Jellybooks for giving me the chance to read this wonderful book.
  
Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky
Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Growing up I didn't have an older brother, so all my music was formed by my mother and father. The latter would play old Irish folk songs and outlaw music by Johnny Cash and the only thing my mother would play was heavy melancholy orchestral movements like Night On Bald Mountain. What my mother would make me do is sit on the floor and tell my father to tell a story while putting on this record. This was big for me. I was probably four years old at the time. It sounded eerie, spooky and epic. My dad would make up these ghost stories but what he was really doing was recreating these children's story soundtracks that I'd listened to! I was too young to understand what he was doing at the time, but he was just making his personalised version of The Little Prince or Tales of Witches, Ghosts And Goblins. So he'd be like [eerie voice]: ""The ghosts would move up the Catskill Mountains..."" and I'd just sit there freezing in fear of these ghost stories! It was like having a musical campfire in your living room. Also, this song featured on the film Fantasia, which was my whole life up until the age of ten. It stuck with me and it was embedded in there now you're mixing visuals. I wasn't into the Mickey Mouse aspect of it, but when you watch the eerie castle and spooky ghosts, this is just feeding a young boy's imagination and this is the world he's going to confront when he grows up. These were all the ingredients going into my soup."

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Verum (The Nocte Trilogy, #2)
Verum (The Nocte Trilogy, #2)
10
10.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
I'm not crazy. I haven't been diagnosed with being mentally insane. I don't hear voices inside my head and I don't hallucinate. At least, I don't think so. After reading Verum, I don't know what to think anymore. Is this real? Am I real? What are we? Courtney Cole has me spiraling in a deep pit of unending madness and I don't think I can claw my way out. When Nocte was finished, I was curious to find out what Dare's secret was, but I felt stable - finally. Then I read Verum. I felt like I was becoming insane, as if the insanity of the Savage's home was transmitting from the pages and straight into my brain. I couldn't keep up and just when I thought I was, everything would crumble and I'd have to rebuild. From the beginning, things were shaky and weird, but as the book progressed, I literally felt my sanity slipping. Calla walked me through a roller coaster of emotions that ended up with one same feeling: crazy. I felt psychotic. Literally. Mystery after mystery, lie after lie, revelation after revelation. I didn't know what was real and what was a figment of Calla's imagination. I still don't know if I should believe any of what I just read. Courtney has made me question my existence. I'm a little afraid to read Initium and then Lux. No, scratch that, I'm terrified. The worst part? As frustrated as I am at not knowing the full story or being able to understand the full picture, I absolutely love it. Guess that makes me certifiable. I'm insane.
  
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