Thank you to Net Galley for this ARC!!

This book is extremely different to what I usually read but completely blew me away. It is unsettling, uncomfortable, creepy and infuriating!

It follows two separate storylines. That of a German doctor who emigrates to America after the war, and a Cuban family who move to America during the rise of Fidel Castro. Wilhelm Von Tor (the doctor) is fascinated with death, and believes people can live a second life after death by returning their soul to their body. When he starts to care for Luciana, her family realise something is wrong but are powerless to stop him.

This story was so amazingly written. I found myself so angry throughout the story at the treatment of Gabriella and her family, and also Wilhelm’s selfishness and clear insanity regarding his project. He was driven by misogyny, fascism and a fascination with a scientific project that left no regard for others.

Reading the acknowledgments at the end and finding out this story was based on true stories was heartbreaking and had me sitting and thinking about the book for a long time.

Parry wrote this story so phenomenally and I’m so glad I got to read it!

WOW!!! The closest author I've found yet to Hanya Yanagihara - in fact, this book had a lot in common with The People in the Trees. Everything in this book is absolutely bizarre from beginning to end - my jaw literally dropped when I finished the book to find it was all based on a true story. Without giving spoilers, there were several moments when I was like "oh come on, absolutely nobody would respond like that" only to find that, in the historical case that inspired the novel, people absolutely did respond like that. I couldn't believe I had never heard of the real-life Carl Tanzler and Elena de Hoyos. This is a VERY disturbing story - like The People in the Trees, you will be reading from the point of view of a seriously deranged and predatory human being. But it's a beautifully written exploration of obsession, gender roles, and perception and I couldn't put it down.

5.0

This book definitely gave me the ick when reading it - in a good way, as you mainly read from the perspective of the unreliable and unlikeable Wilhelm Von Tore, a doctor that tries to ressurect a girl he fell in love with when treating her tuberculosis.
A sensitive reader should definitely check out content warnings before reading this!
But it was brilliantly written and the context given in the afterword really elevated the experience for me (what do you mean this was based on a true story wtf).

The vibes it gave me were a mix of Frankenstein and Lolita-esque (yes, the girl here is 19, but the way he talks about her).

This is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read and I mean that as a compliment because I've read a lot of horror books. Think of Frankenstein & Lolita—that's the whole book but with more gore, blood and very VERY GROTESQUE. The novel is inspired by the real story of Carl Tanzler, the man who dug up a woman’s corpse and lived with it like they were newlyweds. Yes, that actually happened. And yes, it somehow gets worse.

The author takes that horror and builds something even more unsettling: a fictional doctor named Wilhelm von Tore, who thinks he’s in love, but really just wants control over a woman, over death, over the narrative. He’s a monster with good penmanship. Which is horrifying. But also very on-brand for a man who refers to a human woman as a “project.” What makes it worse is that he doesn’t think he’s evil. He thinks he’s romantic. Thoughtful. Innovative. He calls it love. It’s actually medical-grade narcissism with a scalpel.

And then there’s Gabriela, Luciana’s sister and the only reason you don’t throw the whole book into the sea. Her voice is sharp, grieving, and completely done with the kind of men who rewrite women into objects. She says, “He thought he owned me because he loved me. He did not understand that love sets free.” Her chapters are what keep the book honest and human.

The horror here isn’t just what Wilhelm does to Luciana’s body. It’s what he believes he’s entitled to in the name of science, genius, and “love.” It’s gothic, yes. It’s gruesome. But it’s also a sharp, scathing critique of the way women are romanticized to death; literally and figuratively.

This story isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s chilling, cerebral, and uncomfortable in exactly the way it should be. And it’s good. Like, really good. Just maybe don’t read it right before bed. Or during lunch. Or on a date. Ever, actually lmao

5 ⭐️. Would highly recommend.
But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Parry’s prose is lush and unsettling, weaving together beauty and brutality in a way that lingers long after the final page. The dual perspectives—Wilhelm’s delusional grandeur and Luci’s haunting resistance—create a gripping tension, exposing the horrors of male entitlement and the violation of agency. While not for the faint of heart, the book is a brilliant, disturbing exploration of love, control, and the monstrous lengths some will go to in the name of devotion.

I was very interested to read this book. However I cannot comment on the content, because the ebook is randomly missing groups of letters, making it impossible for me to comfortably read.

Still planning on picking this up from the library upon publication.

A modern gothic horror story of sexual obsession, medical abuse, and coercion masquerading as love. Creepy while being intensely gripping, sinister yet shot through with mesmerising beauty and grotesque whilst poetically beautiful. This is not for the faint of heart.

𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐭𝐞𝐞𝐫𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐡 & 𝐏𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐤𝐢𝐧 | 𝐏𝐮𝐬𝐡𝐤𝐢𝐧 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐝𝐯𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐲 𝐯𝐢𝐚 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐆𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐎𝐫𝐩𝐡𝐞𝐮𝐬 𝐁𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐬 𝐀 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 𝐛𝐲 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐲

Orpheus Builds a Girl is a beautifully grotesque triumph—equal parts chilling, lyrical, and fiercely feminist. Heather Parry takes a real-life horror and reshapes it into something far more powerful: a reclamation. A rage-fueled, meticulously crafted response to a story that’s too often been told from the wrong perspective.

From the very beginning, I was gripped by the dual narrative—one voice cold and clinical, the other full of heat, fury, and tragic clarity. It’s a dance between the abuser and the abused, science and obsession, myth and monstrosity. Parry doesn’t flinch. She lays bare the violence of control, of romanticized possession, and forces us to look.

What struck me most was the way this book reclaims narrative power. The woman at the heart of the story—so often silenced in versions of this tale—is given voice, agency, depth. And that voice? It sings. It screams. It survives. Parry’s prose is razor-sharp, elegant and unnerving in equal measure.

This is horror rooted in reality, in history, in the way women’s bodies are mythologized, owned, erased. And yet, despite all that, it’s also a story of resistance. Of telling the story anyway.

If you’re drawn to feminist horror, gothic fiction, or dark stories that refuse to look away, Orpheus Builds a Girl is absolutely essential. It gutted me—in the best, most necessary way.

As much as I wanted to read this, it was unreadable due to the format. Whoever made this into an epub needs to look into how to fix it. There’s no chapters, it’s all jumbled up.

My Thoughts
Orpheus Builds a Girl is the kind of novel that leaves a permanent mark on your psyche. I finished the final page in stunned silence, wondering what dark alchemy I had just witnessed. Heather Parry’s debut is macabre and magnificent, a gothic tale woven with such care and emotional precision that it simultaneously horrifies and haunts.

Told in alternating perspectives, Wilhelm’s chillingly calm narrative and Gabriela’s aching, grief-soaked letters. The book masterfully contrasts obsession with love, scientific ambition with moral decay, and madness with memory. The duality is astounding. I found myself recoiling in horror at Wilhelm’s warped justification of his actions, and then, in the very next chapter, weeping with Gabriela as she mourned her sister in a world that never gave her the justice she deserved.

Parry’s writing is lyrical, controlled, and emotionally devastating. She manages to evoke empathy for both voices not because they’re equally right, but because they’re equally human in their need to be heard. Wilhelm’s delusions are written so intimately that you begin to understand (and fear) how far obsession can go when it’s fed by power and delusion. Gabriela’s voice is a vital counterbalance, grounded, raw, and painfully aware of the damage done not just to Luciana, but to her family, her culture, and her memory.

Who Should Read It?
-Fans of gothic horror and psychological thrillers
-Readers who appreciate literary horror with emotional and philosophical weight
-Those drawn to dark retellings of myth

Final Verdict
Orpheus Builds a Girl is an unmissable debut: a gothic masterpiece that dares to look love, death, and madness directly in the eye. It’s a book that shakes you, unsettles you, and then asks you to sit with that discomfort. The kind of book you never forget. The kind of story that dares to remember the girl, not just the monster.

Grateful to NetGalley, Pushkin Press and Heather Parry for the opportunity to read an advance copy of this story in exchange for an honest review

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC. 

I realized while reading this that I've actually read about the true story that it's based on before. 

It made me feel a little weird to read a "feminist retelling" of a true event that happened to actual people. Especially when the real story already very much centers the sister's perspective instead of the guy's. 

So that was a little weird, but overall I do think it's a fascinating story. But I guess I'm just not sure why it wouldn't be better to learn about the story with the original details instead of a fictionalized version. 

But anyway, those are just my general feelings about fictionalized retellings of true crime. Never sure how to feel about it even when I do enjoy the actual piece of work. 

The actual book was a good retelling though, I enjoyed the way it way told and the writing was very strong.

Thanks to Netgallery, the publisher and Heather Parry for this ARC.

This is a challenging, dark and emotional at times read, taking the true bizarre story of Carl Tanzler and Elena Millagro de Hoyos as it's basis but changing the names to Wilhelm Von Tore and Luciana Herrera Madrigal aka Luci. There are two narrators in Wilhelm and Luci's sister Gabriela. His side being a written as a medical paper but you see his delusion, obsession, misogyny and racism and he comes off to me an unreliable narrator and just a creep, whereas Gabriela's version feels more truthful and shows that Luci was a complex girl but also shows how when she gets ill the mother of them who has suffered loss of one child would be swayed by a man claiming to be able to save her child even when she knows he has dark intentions. Also Gabriela writes about their childhood in Cuba and having to flee to America when Castro comes into power , adjusting to their new lives and circumstances that would make them susceptible to the manipulations of a man like Von Tore. Also you see the prejudices against Cubans and also just how the system allow for someone to some of the stuff he does. Also we see just as now that some people will sympathise with the criminal and support their actions. I really enjoyed this book and will read more from this author in the future.

I think this one is based on Carl Tanzler. it is impeccably written, and I love how well-written his POV is and how clear it is that he's an untrustable narrator.

Holy mother, this book. Chilling, compelling and beautiful, it is one of the most intense and impressive debuts I’ve read in ages. I gulped it down in two sittings and then could not sleep for love nor money. I can give no higher praise to a novel, frankly.

Orpheus Builds A Girl is the story of Dr Wilhelm von Tore, who, bereft at the loss of his wife to TB, attempts to return her to life. But von Tore’s story is not the only one - we also hear from Luciana’s sister, Gabriela, who weaves a very different story of her sister’s life and death. The result is an utterly unsettling novel that forces the reader to grapple with themes of consent, racism, misogyny and how we view desperate men in love.

We trace both narrators’ origins from childhood to the point where their stories collide. Wilhelm was born in Germany, became a Nazi (of course) and fled to America after the war - raised by his grtandmother and mother, he was always fascinated by the mystical, and how it might intersect with science. Meanwhile, Gabriela is the eldest of 5 Cuban siblings who escape civil unrest to start a new life in Florida. She dotes upon Luci, her strong-willed and fiery younger sister, who eventually falls prey to von Tore’s obsessions with her.

When Luci contracts TB, von Tore convinces the family that he is the only one who can save her; the family’s financial hardship means that they have no choice, and soon von Tore takes over the Madrigal home, and Luciana, entirely - even after she has sadly passed away. I wasn’t prepared for what happened next, though this isn’t a book where plot twists are paramount - instead it's the visceral and striking writing that captured my attention. It is all-consuming.

In an interview, Parry notes that “the book is really about obsession and self-delusion, as well as the structures that allow some men to wield great social power.” von Tore is written to be strikingly unlikeable - there were points that I gasped at his gross opinions and deeds. His all-consuming obsession with his own “genius” is what drives the novel - this is categorically not a love story. A slice of unnerving Gothic horror, and a book that will leave me feeling uneasy for a long, long time.

An ethical question about this book - as it is a fictional retelling of the real life exploitation of Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, whose body was stolen and held in the home of a man obsessed with her for seven years before then being paraded around for six months to the public like a side show act after her body was recovered - is this book further romanticizing and dehumanizing her or is it giving Maria a voice and providing a message so that we as readers are better able to share HER story and not her abuser's?

First, this book was slow, disjointed, and spent an absurd amount of time over explaining everything but I was more disturbed by the portrayal of the characters than anything else in this novel. Our female narrator, Gabriela, describes her sister Luciana as a wild young woman who was known for her beauty and rebelliousness while our male narrator, Wilhelm, describes his love of science and his unhealthy obsession with the women in his life from his grandmother to eventually Luciana in this almost lyrical way.

I was trying to understand why the author was putting so much effort into Wilhelm's narrative, the book even opens stating it's telling his story, his biography, with blurbs from Gabriela as rebuttals to his case. It took everything in me not to just put this aside and call it a day. I don't mind an unreliable or even an villainous narrator, but when the character is based on a real life monster I have some concerns. I didn't like Wilhelm, he by no means was a likeable character, but I still felt uncomfortable reading from a psychopaths point of view - knowing these events actually happened.

In the end I couldn't get over the relationship to the real life incident that inspired the book and I felt truly uneasy about Elena Milagro de Hoyos' tragedy being rewritten, yet again, with a male narrator romanticizing the story from his POV even though the author added the sister's perspective. It felt wrong.

I really enjoyed this book - especially the writing style. It's based on a really creepy true story (recommend looking that up after reading the book). It was almost like reading an obsessive love, true crime book. If that's what you like, highly recommend.