February 1, 2021
The author of LJ-starred The Frangipani Hotel ranges across a half-century of Vietnamese history as she tells the stories of three troubled women: a teenager who's permanently traumatized after getting lost while fleeing her furious father, a woman who captures a rare two-headed cobra to please a former lover, and a young American in contemporary Saigon whose boyfriend disappears.
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Starred review from May 10, 2021
Kupersmith’s exceptional debut novel (after the collection The Frangipani Hotel) offers profound and original insight on Vietnam’s tortured history. Twenty-two-year-old Winnie, a mixed-race American woman, signs up to teach English in Saigon in an attempt to connect with the Vietnamese part of her heritage, and essentially dooms herself to failure: “her life would continue to be as empty as her luggage, wherever she went,” Kupersmith writes. Winnie figures out how to placate her students by helping them learn American terms such as “booty call” and “loaded nachos,” and enters a more or less satisfactory romantic relationship with a fellow teacher, but then disappears. At this point, the chapters range widely beyond Winnie’s present-day story to the days, months, and years before and after her disappearance. 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.
Starred review from June 1, 2021
In her second novel, Kupersmith (The Frangipani Hotel, 2014) combines elements of horror, mystery, and historical and literary fiction to create a strange and wondrous story. Winnie, a 22-year-old Vietnamese-American, is living in Vietnam ostensibly to teach English but really in an attempt to re-create herself. Sadly, she finds herself even more lost than in the U.S., as a lonely, terrible teacher, still caught between her half white American and half Vietnamese selves. Shortly after Winnie moves in with Long, her sort-of boyfriend, she disappears. Subsequent chapters, all starting with a time before or after the disappearance, introduce a variety of characters: a pepper farmer's daughter who disappeared in a rubber-tree forest that has since burned and been taken over by snakes; a fortune teller with terrifying supernatural capabilities who heads the Saigon Spirit Eradication Company; two young brothers who are both in love with their best friend; and Frenchmen, 69 years before Violet's disappearance, who reflect Vietnam's colonial history. 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.
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Starred review from May 1, 2021
A wide-ranging first novel that peels back the layers of a haunted Vietnam. Winnie is just 22 when she moves in with her great aunt and two surly cousins in Saigon to teach English at the Achievement! International Language Academy. Winnie feels herself to be unexceptional in every way: Half White American, half Vietnamese, she sees herself as having "the muddy ambiguity of the middle." (In a "taupe" bathroom stall, she gloomily wonders if she is blending into the walls.) She's also a frankly terrible English teacher, and she lives in fear of being found out by her zealous expat colleagues. But Winnie is finally settling into life in Saigon with her boyfriend, Long, when she suddenly goes missing. Kupersmith, herself of Vietnamese heritage, interweaves Winnie's life in Vietnam with other people's stories, all linked together by a supernatural bond: There's the daughter of a prominent pepper company owner, who disappeared into the forest a generation before Winnie and was rescued under mysterious circumstances. There's the team at Saigon Spirit Eradication, a kind of Vietnamese Ghostbusters, only the head of the organization, known as the Fortune Teller, is not what he appears to be. The novel also dips into Vietnam's pre- and post-colonial history with French characters to explore the ways in which war creates another kind of hauntedness. There's even a possessed dog. 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.
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