Modern Tarot: Connecting with Your Higher Self Through the Wisdom of the Cards
7.0
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The beloved literary iconoclast delivers a fresh twenty-first century primer on tarot that can be...
Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture
Christopher D. Bader, F. Carson Mencken and Joseph O. Baker
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The untold account of the countless Americans who believe in, or personally experience, paranormal...
Time's Convert
8.0
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From the Sunday Times Number One bestselling author of A Discovery of Witches, soon to be a major...
Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature
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This book offers a new perspective on the otherworlds of medieval literature. These fantastical...
The Call of Cthulhu: And Other Weird Stories
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Collecting uniquely uncanny tales from the master of American horror, H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of...
Radio Free Albemuth
8.0
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A preliminary to Dick's masterwork, Valis, in which Phil appears as an explicitly named...
The Severed Streets
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Summer in London: a city in turmoil. The vicious murder of a well-known MP is like a match to tinder...
Moon Over Soho: The Second PC Grant Mystery
8.5
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I was my dad's vinyl-wallah: I changed his records while he lounged around drinking tea, and that's...
ClareR (5726 KP) rated Build Your Home Around My Body in Books
Jul 28, 2021
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.