Thank you so much to PushkinPress & NetGalley for the e-arc!

3.75!

This was a tough one to rate as I wanted to know what went on and what would happen in the end given the two sort of narrations we get which tells us two different perspectives on the story, also different emotions. But I also did not want to read because I just could not stand Wilhelm at all.

I was more angry than anything as I read it and the felt it was based on a true story and with how it ended which makes the reader sort of wonder which is which or what to go with made me even angrier lol

I honestly don’t know how to start this review. The story is so horrific, so unbelievable, that it reads like a perfectly crafted horror story. And then you learn it’s based on real events. And that just leaves a deeper, lingering discomfort in your gut.

The first part of the book is a slow build, focusing on the main characters’ backstories, which helps ground you in who they are, where they’re from and what drives them. I personally would’ve preferred it to be a bit more condensed, as it does affect the pacing… but once the second half kicks in, the momentum shifts, hard.

Looking back at the notes I made while reading, I mostly felt anger, disbelief, and straight-up disgust, sometimes all at once. Watching the main character rationalise his actions “all in the name of love and science”, and somehow even find support for them, made me want to throw my hands in the air and just scream out loud.

So… did I enjoy this book? Not exactly. But was I completely hooked and unable to look away? Absolutely. And honestly, isn’t that exactly what you want from a good horror?

This book is impossible to read with all of the errors. I would happily reread it once it’s edited because I was very intrigued by the story’s premise. Hopefully this will be fixed so I can try out this horror novel

Thanks Heather Parry, Steerforth and Pushkin Press for giving me access to the book.

I sadly did not finish this advanced copy at about the 10% mark.
As stated in other reviews, unfortunately the copy I received is missing letters and I do not have the commitment to the book to try to push through and understand missing words and sections of words.
I would still be 100% be happy to ARC read this if the ebook is revised, so keep me in mind.
The storytelling that I was able to read was intriguing and I was very much looking forward to the book.

Very disappointing for the author to receive inconsistent feedback from her ARC team prior to the book launch.
I won't post my review on socials because it would be unfair to judge it publicly on some editing mishaps.

“𝙃𝙤𝙬 𝙬𝙤𝙪𝙡𝙙 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧 𝙜𝙤 𝙗𝙚𝙮𝙤𝙣𝙙 𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙣𝙖𝙧𝙧𝙤𝙬 𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙙𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙬𝙤𝙧𝙡𝙙 𝙞𝙛 𝙬𝙚 𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙬𝙖𝙮 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙙𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙥𝙪𝙩 𝙗𝙚𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙖𝙘𝙚𝙨?”

Orpheus Builds a Girl was a harrowing and unsettling read, even more so that it’s based on a true story. Exploring the line between love and obsession, this was in equal parts compelling and disgusting, but deeply thought-provoking. I enjoyed the gothic style setting and writing, offering a modern Frankenstein-esque vibe.

The book is told from dual perspective which I felt really helped keep the pace moving, through a series of memoirs. Dr Wilhelm Von Tore, an exiled doctor who develops a deep and sickening obsession with a young girl called Luci—who dies of tuberculosis shortly after they first meet. I HATE HATE HATED this man with a burning passion for so many reasons, this is the sort of person we should have been burning at the stake.

Then we have the perspective of Gabriela, Luci’s sister, telling us of the person Luci was before her sickness and death, but also how the doctor worked his way into their home and their lives. My heart hurt SO much for Gabriela and her family, who had so much taken away from them, and not just in the way of death.

Thank you to the author and publisher for providing me with a copy of this book via NetGalley! My review is dedicated to Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos and the other women Parry has taken care to reference in her Acknowledgments of this book.

The concept is chilling and the writing has its moments, but the ARC was full of missing letters and formatting issues, which made it really hard to stay immersed. The story itself felt uneven. A disturbing premise, but the execution didn’t land for me.

While the book is willing to have a an underage girl have a graphic and on page abortion using a hat pin, it is not willing to have a graphic and on page Nazi. Wilhelm’s connection to the Nazi regime is hinted at, coyly, with winks and nods, but by halfway into the book I’m bored. I understand that this is a slow burn, and meant to be a slow building horror, but I’m 40% into the book and I’ve seen Wilhelm abandon two wives, and listened to Luciana’s sister talk about Luciana’s underage sexual escapades. At 40%, Wilhelm and Gabriella are just now meeting, and I’m already tempted to put the book down because … I don’t care. I don’t care bout Wilhelm and the banality of his life, I don’t care Gabriela’s sister, and more importantly, I don’t care about Luciana.

Luciana is supposed to be the reason for this book, this young woman in the body of a prepubescent child who is beloved by her sister and the Nazi doctor both. But all I see is a blank, formless character for both of them to paint their thoughts onto without Luciana being a character in her own right. And maybe that’s the point that, like Lolita (which I think this book drew some inspiration from), she is meant to be an unknown, seen through two different points of view.

Which is fine. I like the idea. I just … don’t like the execution.

Wilhelm is no Humbert Humbert, too cartoonish and cartoonishly unstable to be believed as a real person. Gabriella has no real personality in my opinion, and her voice and Wilhelm’s are much the same, the only difference being the story they’re telling. For me, I would want a stronger voice for either or both storytellers, more a sense that Wilhelm is a real person with actual motivations and not some crazy Nazi doing things because the plot tells him to; to see Gabriella have some point of view about her sister — or even herself and her own life.

During the parts of the book where Wilhelm has Luciana as his ‘wife,’ taking care of her corpse and struggling to keep her body preserved — and dreaming of her having his child — it’s written with far more of an eye to style than substance, and there’s no sense of horror or obsession or anything beyond what the writer is putting to page. I feel like I’m reading an outline of where a story should be, filled in with vague notes in the hopes that I will fill in the blanks with my own imagination.

The writing is adequate, the story is dull, the characters are flat, and the horror is implied rather than being horrifying. It’s a safe book, and not one I enjoyed reading.

I was very excited to read this one but the eARC is full of grammatical errors. So many missing letters on every page. It’s very distracting and took away from me getting lost in the story. I plan on trying to read this again after it releases.

WOW! This book took me on a slow and descriptive ride through history from two different POVs. You have Wilhelm and Gabriela. Wilhelm describes a sad life with a grandmother who loved him, they lived through WWII, the destruction of his city. You are led to believe that he is a victim of circumstance but soon we learn that he causes his circumstances and then blames others. I went into a deep dive of Wilhelm’s psyche; I am a therapist and boy do I have some diagnosis for him. Delusions of grandeur, narcissism… I could go on but you get the idea and I don’t want to spoil anything.

Then we get Gabriela’s point of view, a Cuban woman, from a large family that is trying to make it through the rebellion in Cuba. They relocate to Florida, unfortunately for them at the same time Wilhelm does. The younger sister, Luciana, becomes a product of his fixation and obsession. He forces his way into her family, he takes possession of her and the darkness comes to light. He builds his control on lies and deceit and the fear of a immigrant family.

This book is a slow burn, it takes you through both people’s timelines, you learn where they grew up, how they lived, then the story brings them together. There are graphic depictions regarding a corpse, so please check TW before reading this book. It went from slow and descriptive to dark and descriptive, real fast. Parry’s ability to portray Wilhelm as his true demented self was brilliant, I don’t think I have seen a character with those diagnoses or traits depicted so accurately. It was actually scary that people like that exist in the world, but they do.

If you want a good, slow, haunting read, with some graphic and dark turns, that combines Frankenstein-esque horror with Norman Bates level mommy issues and obsession, then grab this book and read away. I truly look forward to reading more from Heather Parry.

Thank you to NetGalley and Pushkin Press for a digital advanced copy of this book in return this is my honest review.

Flew through this and OMG this book is a fever dream! Orpheus Builds A Girl by Heather Parry is dark, twisted, and totally addictive. It’s got this Gothic vibe mixed with obsession, love, and death in a way that feels both romantic and horrifying. The writing is lush and unsettling—like every sentence drips with tension. If you’re into creepy love stories, unreliable narrators, and that eerie feeling that something is very wrong, this is your jam. It’s haunting, weirdly beautiful, and will stick in your head long after you finish.

I am such a sucker for an unreliable narrator and seeing the contrast between Wilhelm and Gabriela's chapters worked really well. In other books that use a similar format, it often feels like a slog going through each characters version of the same events but Parry keeps it interesting.

This book is gothic and grotesque - think Frankenstein and Lolita. It was a difficult read but also so compelling and well-written. I didn't realise it was based on true events until the end (I actually don't think I would have read it had I known...)

I really really urge people to look at trigger warnings for this one - there is one particular scene which I found so horrific and I'm not usually triggered by anything.

This proof was almost unreadable. There were letters missing on every page which made it hard to read and kept pulling me out of the story.

It's a dark, grim true story that's told in a slow burn, compelling narrative. It's an insane story but Parry made it feel credible. I loved the writing style and the voice of the sister added a necessary touch to the strange and unsettling narrative.

This was excellent. I was gripped by suspense from the first page. Thank you for making it available here.

Even in death you won’t be free of them.

This book was horrifying. And yet I couldn’t put it down. To say I loved this book would be wrong. It angered me, disgusted me, made me fear for poor Luci every time that man came near. Horrendous story. Give me five more.

I started this book wondering “well, where is the horror part?” And then this man leeched onto this poor teenager. And I thought “okay, so this is the horror part.” Spoiler: it was NOT. This story made me sick and I just could not stop reading.

Hats of to the author for creating a man so vile, it made me sick to my stomach. I am for sure recommending this to all my friends to experience the same trauma. Thank you to NetGalley for the eArc!

I think i'm going to love this book, but sadly had to DNF at 7% cause it's impossible to read due to all the errors in the galley edition, there are words missing the first letters, and it was making me so nervous.
So my rate in this case has nothing to do with the book itself, i put a 1 star cause i couldn't read it.

DNF due to too many errors in the galley that distracted me. Lots of combinations of letters are simply missing, like "fi" and others.

Excuse me whilst I run off to google the true story that this is based on.
Because this is truly creepy, and pushes the idea of obsession to the maximum.
I really felt for the family, loosing their sister, and all that followed.
But some of the best bits were when the doctor voiced his delusions.
Cracking story.

Deeply unsettling.
A book about what happens when a man with the audacity that men usually have, acts on his impulses and selfish desires. I liked both of the povs, the were distinctive enough to follow both lines clearly.
The writing style was a bit dry for my personal taste, but it suited the story well.

3.5 stars.

Orpheus Builds a Girl is a dark and deeply unsettling novel inspired by a chilling true crime from the 1940s. Told through dual perspectives, we follow a disgraced doctor whose obsession with experimental treatments leads him down a disturbing path, and a young woman desperate to save her sister, who is battling tuberculosis. What begins as an unconventional medical intervention quickly spirals into something grotesque and horrifying.

What really stood out to me was how closely the novel clings to real events—so much so that I often found myself pausing to research the case behind it. It's a horror story not in the traditional sense—there are no supernatural frights—but rather one of psychological terror. The doctor’s voice is so clinical and composed that it becomes genuinely chilling, especially as his obsession with Luci, the sick sister, deepens in disturbing and nauseating ways.

The inclusion of Luci’s sister’s point of view added a necessary emotional weight to the narrative. While the historical record tends to focus on the doctor, her voice humanizes the tragedy and offers a contrasting lens that reveals the true horror of the situation. Shifting between the doctor's delusional perspective and the sister’s grounded one brings a growing sense of dread that becomes hard to look away from—even when you might want to.

This is a grim, compelling read that won’t be for everyone, but fans of psychological horror rooted in real-life darkness will likely find it both fascinating and haunting.

I DNFed this quite early for two reason. The file copy was missing quite a lot of letters, especially the combinations of 'fi' and 'th', so every 'the' reads like 'e' and something like 'finally' reads 'nally'. It is impossible to properly read a book published like this, let alone enjoy it.

On a more substantial level, I hadn't realised just to what extent the narrative is built on a real story. It is not just 'inspired', it is literally beat to beat following what happened to a real woman. Heather Parry is a White woman trying to 'give voice' to a Latina woman whose corpse was desecrated in a most vile manner by writing from a Latina POV without any reference or acknowledgement of the real story and real Elena. It is creatively boring, on par with those endless Greek myth retellings (speaking of Greek myths, calling it 'Orpheus something something' is total slander on my boy Orpheus, and a romantisation of what was done to Elena), and morally bankrupt, as it is not Heather Parry's place to tell this story (if it is anybody's at all).

The bits I did read did quite a good job of recreating a deranged modern Frankenstein POV, I guess one star for that. Would have stuck with it for longer if not for the terrible quality of the copy.