... eerie and electric ... That is this novel’s power: It followed me into my days, refusing to release me ... This is a big, packed novel. Reading it provides a sensation not unlike riding on a motorbike overloaded with passengers and wares: It careens, it tilts and at times I wondered if it would reach its destination without a crash. But Kupersmith proves herself a fearless driver who revels in the daunting challenge she has set for herself. There are so many ways this novel could have lost its balance; instead, its too-much-ness makes for a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve ... It helps that Kupersmith is a brilliant technician of the small moment, the just-right observation. Her sensory language is at once bold and perfectly precise ... The novel also deliciously skewers backpacker and expat cultures in Southeast Asia ... For a novel that sustains such a menacing mood, Build Your House Around My Body is frequently very funny ... Like many narratives that braid together large casts across time and place, Kupersmith’s relies on numerous improbable coincidences to tie its stories together...A reader could be forgiven for thinking that Saigon is a city of 10 instead of nearly 10 million ... Yet Kupersmith convinces the reader that these characters are drawn together not by narrative necessity, but by larger forces. As the coincidences piled up, I had the uncanny sense that I was witnessing the inexorable machinery of fate. One of Kupersmith’s most dazzling feats is that she manages to slot her characters into this machinery while also letting them feel invigoratingly autonomous. The same careening sense of possibility that energizes the novel at its grandest scale infuses its interiority. Nearly every character is endowed with psychological peculiarity and the freedom to surprise, and this grants a riveting, kinetic quality to the simplest domestic scenes...The one exception is Winnie herself, whom Kupersmith keeps on a much tighter leash. Her downward spiral is textbook: slovenliness, drinking, insomnia, drinking to combat insomnia. It’s not that any of this is unrealistic, but that the narrative reminds the reader again and again that Winnie is this and only this: empty, lost, a nonentity ... If Winnie’s descent feels overdetermined, it nevertheless illuminates the novel’s primary preoccupation: with the body and its violations, both the sexual trauma experienced by the female characters and the ravages of colonial occupation and war upon the body of Vietnam ... provide an ingenious means of exploring the enduring effects of trauma ... Kupersmith’s ending is as bold and surprising as the plot that precedes it, but it is also stunningly delicate. The careening journey ends with a gentle dismount; Kupersmith was in complete control all along.

... a beautifully wrought, non-linear tale of ghosts, missing girls, and revenge set against the backdrop of colonial and post-colonial Vietnam ... the real stroke of genius, and why I found myself falling in love with Build Your House Around My Body, is that Kupersmith’s subtle skill of drawing our focus away from Winnie’s inevitable fate also matches Winnie’s desire to fade into the scenery ... such a fantastic book. For one, it’s a novel that deals passionately with several themes, whether it’s Winnie’s struggle with her identity, or Binh’s independence and her refusal to be boxed in by the men in her life, or the shaping of Vietnam by the figurative and literal ghosts of its French colonial past. And, while I can’t speak to Kupersmith’s characterisation of Vietnamese folklore, her use of smoke spirits that manipulate people and animals as flesh puppets coupled with the preponderance of snakes (something to keep in mind if slithery reptiles bother you) make for a dark fantasy that’s truly chilling and creepy. In a year where the ongoing, depressing reality of COVID has made it challenging to escape to other places and other worlds, I had no such trouble with immersing myself in Violet Kupersmith’s wonderful debut novel.

... marvellous and confounding ... Interwoven with Winnie’s story are spooky vignettes taking place in the days and decades before and after her vanishing. In some of the novel’s most thrilling and original sections, we follow ghost hunters from the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co in 2011, encounter a Vietnamese French schoolboy left on a mountain as the Japanese launch their coup in 1945, and meet a trio of childhood friends in the early 90s—the bland brothers Tan and Long, who pine for the headstrong and rather caricaturish Binh. The reader gradually gleans connections between the stories in ingenious or sometimes convoluted ways ... with its seam of delightfully lurid feminist body horror, Build Your House Around My Body more closely recalls the fabulist work of Kelly Link, Intan Paramaditha and Mariana Enríquez ... At their strongest, the novel’s descriptive powers and sense of place are vivid and intoxicating ... at other moments the descriptions are overegged or too technical. Framing the disparate strands around Winnie’s disappearance can jolt the reader out of more engaging plotlines, most notably that of the ghost hunters.

...haunting ... There is no shortage of nuanced story lines that delve into the strange or the spooky in this book. In fact, this might be the book’s biggest shortcoming: Kupersmith’s interconnected spheres are complex and intensely visceral at their best, but often confusing in their sheer number and vastness ... In spite of this, Kupersmith’s knack for drawing readers into the fantastical is readily apparent, as is her ability to deftly navigate the subtleties of a country’s complicated history ... Kupersmith’s dexterous, sensitive storytelling ensures that readers understand clearly that the real monsters of this tale are those who seek to take by force what does not belong to them.

Kupersmith’s grasp of her story’s secondary characters is as firm as her grasp of Winnie ... It would have been easy for a book with so much going on to collapse into incoherence, but it’s an engaging read the whole way through. Build Your House Around My Body is an unsettling and powerful work.

Kupersmith is a beautiful writer and weaves the story of Winnie’s disappearance into a larger narrative that spans more than eighty years of Vietnamese history ... All of the side stories Kupersmith introduces—from back before WWII to months before Winnie’s disappearance—come together for a chilling and thrilling conclusion. She thought it necessary to include at the front of the book an extensive list of the many relationships between the different characters, as well as an illustrated map of the Highlands area where some of the story takes place, but Kupersmith’s storytelling makes it relatively easy to keep track of these different relationships without referring back to these cheat sheets, except for at the very end as the unhurried, steady narrative amps up many notches. Although it can be a little difficult to keep up, Build Your House Around My Body is an engaging story set against a detailed look at contemporary Vietnamese culture and how that has been shaped, for better or worse, by influences going back to French colonial times.

... it’s difficult to continue reading, but the temptation is too high not to keep turning pages. Each chapter disorients and disturbs but also entices ... Kupersmith juggles a lot of people, places and events, and the details within them always connect to other characters, the mysterious conflict and additional plot points. For the vast majority of the book, 'what does this have to do with anything?' is not on the reader’s mind; bizarre, terror-inducing events are promptly contextualized in later chapters. The novel develops its characters with relatable and sympathetic plights and thickens its supernatural mystery with carefully placed hints and literary breadcrumbs. However, the trail leads to an out-of-place resolution that distracts from an otherwise well-woven story ... an A- novel that would’ve earned an A+ if it weren’t for its final 50 pages. But its 300 or so preceding pages are a testament to a talented author who knows how to frighten her readers and intertwine a wide-ranging story. Kupersmith’s ability to balance character development with a thickening plot, conflict and suspense is extraordinary. There are still questions after finishing the book, but they lend to the mysteriousness and horror of the tale’s supernatural elements, and make a second reading just as exciting as the first.

Kupersmith combines elements of horror, mystery, and historical and literary fiction to create a strange and wondrous story ... Kupersmith expertly ties these characters together through plot and reccurring talismans—snakes, a dog, a lottery ticket, a policeman’s hat—and magically manages to create a story both epic and intensely intimate. Patient and observant readers will be richly rewarded.

Any description of the book could make it sound like too many spinning plates, but Kupersmith manages the whirl with dexterity and confidence. The novel is epic enough in scope to require a character list and several pages of maps, but the pages fly as the reader is compelled to figure out how all the narratives will eventually collide ... Drawing from genres as diverse as horror, humor, and historical fiction, Kupersmith creates a rich and dazzling spectacle.

... exceptional ... offers profound and original insight on Vietnam’s tortured history ... These vivid vignettes—horrifying and hilarious by turns—are marvelously written and include nightmarish scenes of immolation, two-headed snakes, and other accounts of disappearing young women, as well as a memorable team of ghost hunters and a soul-swapping dog. The multiple pages of maps and dramatis personae at the novel’s opening help ground the reader through this disorienting but captivating opus, until the clues and characters coalesce in a way that’s both surprising and satisfying. Magic can be both benevolent and monstrous in Kupersmith’s work, and here she indelibly illustrates the ways in which Vietnam’s legacies of colonialism, war, and violence against women continue to haunt. This more than fulfills the promise of her first book.