Orpheus Builds A Girl

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Heather Parry is a major talent’ Julia Armfield, author of Our Wives Under the Sea ‘I am in awe of this wonderful book.

Gabriela also never felt like a real person to me, she was just so passive with everything and her segments caused such tonal shifts by the end of the book. I’m excited to see what else Heather publishes, so I can be left pondering more of life’s horrors in what feels like a productive, somehow beautiful, way. From the start Parry is able to create something unsettling in the chapters devised through von Tore's descriptions; there is something remarkably twisted and self-gratifying in the doctor's chapters of his youth that only become more questionable once the two character's lives become intertwined. Like girl stop being a bootlicker and skip to how y’all left Cuba because communism bad or whatever.Imagine the grotesque of Frankenstein with the perverse obsession of Lolita, but with commentary on the role fascism and white supremacy play in the control of women’s bodies. As he looks back on his life he reflects on his upbringing in Dresden, his beloved grandmother and his medical career during the second world war. Wilhelm uses his intellect and resources; the pedestal his Grandmother raised him on, and his own ability to spin a story, to construct a justification for his actions, threading the breadcrumbs throughout his history and recollection isn't it curious that there is no-one to back up his claims from his past?

Orpheus Builds a Girl is superbly creepy from the start, Parry expertly lacing unsettling details through her narratives. Starting with the fact that it can’t even be said this book is inspired by what happened to Maria Elena Milagro Hoyos; it IS her story, beat by beat. At times I kinda wished the Gabriela chapters were replaced with other unbiased sources of information like autopsy reports or news reports of the trial or even stuff from Luci’s pov because we never really got to know her outside of she got into trouble and then she got sick. A stark critique of the societal structures that allow powerful people to escape consequences, and brutally realistic answer to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Orpheus Builds a Girl is a darker, more visceral, Modern Prometheus.

It is a horror novel which is very understated as there's no real scares or supernatural elements, rather the point of view of the doctor is so calm and collected that it really creeps you out how he speaks about Luci (the sick sister) and in his growing delusion the horror becomes more and more disgusting until you find yourself needing to take a break from the book.

Set in the 1970s in Key West, Floida, a German doctor who had worked for the Nazis in his youth, Wilhelm von Tore, becomes infatuated with a young Cuban woman, Luci, who he is treating for tuberculosis. My jaw would hang open in horror whilst reading Wilhem’s account and then in contrast I’d be blinking away tears reading Gabriela’s story.This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

Hugely compelling, cleverly written, and full of truly disturbing images of decaying corpses (I was internally screaming throughout the final third), if you can stomach it Orpheus Build A Girl is a must-read meditation on death, power and bodily autonomy, with the most beautiful cover I've seen this year. I've read many books that heavily touch on the topic of death and what happens to a person after they die - yet no book before, not even the non-fiction ones, have disturbed me as much as this when it comes to that. About halfway through, the switching POVs stop adding anything to the story and make things feel repetitive. Orpheus Builds a Girl" consists of the more or less medical account of a Nazi doctor who dabbels in resurrection after emigrating to America and pretending to be Polish.Both of them scream Latina characters written by non Latinos and Luci especially is just the spicy Latina trope. Throughout events out of their control both von Tore and Gabi's families end up in Florida, removed from their homes and dispossessed in a foreign country, a fact von Tore uses against Luci and Gabi, seeing their Cuban heritage as more foreign than himself as a German, urg, racism.