![]() ![]() Winnie’s life, as always, was a canvas of “smallness and loneliness” until she sat next to Long at a drunken company dinner. At the language center where she teaches English, Winnie makes it her mission to avoid other teachers. Every day of her first few months in Saigon, Winnie wanders the streets and alleys, reading another mystery or cheesy romance novel. In a foreign city surrounded by nothing she has seen before, Winnie still cannot shake the feeling that she still is the same person: a vague outline of a woman blending into everything else, indistinguishable from any passerby. ![]() While Winnie resents being the forgettable child, she has grown to find comfort in being invisible, perhaps even a bit too comfortable. As the youngest, Winnie spent her life in the shadows of her successful older siblings, loitering in the background as they built their traditionally revered careers and made their own families. Packing up her life and moving to Vietnam is the boldest thing Winnie has ever done. Build Your House Around My Body – 378 pages – $27.00 – Penguin Random House Ultimately, the city was her chance for a fresh start. Winnie is a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese American (or Việt Kiều in Vietnamese) woman who sets out for Saigon with nothing but “a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh.” Winnie did not have a plan. ![]() ANGELINE KEK WRITES - Hauntings, secrets, graveyards - Violet Kupersmith’s debut novel, Build Your House Around My Body (2021) - is an ash-charred sky splattered with these ghastly hues. ![]()
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