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" For her family-history homework assignment, a Houston schoolgirl asks her grandmother about escaping Vietnam by boat because &amp;quot;that&amp;#039;s an A-plus story!&amp;quot; Grandma, non-plussed by this mercenary request, tells instead of her honeymoon voyage at age 16 with her hungover fisherman husband, who heedlessly took her out to sea and into the teeth of a gale. As they come to fear for their lives, something approaches dancing across the roiling waters: a corpse, &amp;quot;ribbons of kelp threaded among the white bones of its rib cage,&amp;quot; yet &amp;quot;a little too alive to be completely dead.&amp;quot; The newlyweds escape death but are left wondering whether a debt has thus been incurred to the spirit world, one that it &amp;quot;would eventually come collecting.&amp;quot; Why can&amp;#039;t you tell me how you escaped Vietnam? the schoolgirl asks. The grandmother replies, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s simple, child: Did we ever really escape?&amp;quot;  This schoolgirl is a stand-in for Violet Kupersmith, the 24-year-old author of The Frangipani Hotel (Spiegel &amp;amp;amp; Grau), whose mother fled Vietnam by boat and married an American man. In this auspicious volume, Kupersmith has reshaped and womanhandled traditional Vietnamese folktales that her grandmother told her into a wildly energetic, present-tense fusillade of short stories: We meet, among others, a clerk at a Hanoi hotel where one attractive guest&amp;#039;s presence goes oddly unnoticed by others, except a dashing American businessman with a tinted-window SUV, much to his eventual regret, and a young U.S. consular official whose American-\u00E9migr\u00E9 boyfriend&amp;#039;s casual sexual history with local women sends her a little bit around the bend. In perhaps the most pungent story here, a young woman who works the graveyard shift stocking shelves at Kwon&amp;#039;s World Grocery in suburban Houston befriends an old man she finds standing naked beside a Dumpster. His problem: He occasionally turns into a 14-foot python. &amp;quot;I am just a very old man who is some- times a python,&amp;quot; the man tells the woman. &amp;quot;But you, my child, are a creature far more com- plex.&amp;quot; One might suspect that Kupersmith, who is working on her first novel, is that creature. Related:  Pages From Mona Simpson&amp;#039;s Casebook Related: ELLE Readers Pick the Must-Read Books for April Related:  A Book To Deconstruct the Work-Life Balance "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a12703/the-frangipani-hotel-violet-kupersmith/?click=hprc>