Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir

Description

Told with a lyrical, almost-dreamlike voice as intoxicating as the moonflowers and orchids that inhabit this world, Monsoon Mansion is a harrowing yet triumphant coming-of-age memoir exploring the dark, troubled waters of a circle of relatives’s upward push and fall from grace within the Philippines. It will take a young warrior to live to tell the tale it.

Cinelle Barnes was once barely three years old when her circle of relatives moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home within the Philippines. Filled together with her mother’s opulent social aspirations and the gloriously over the top evidence of her father’s self-made success, it was once a girl’s storybook playland. But if a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother’s terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle’s fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined. Formerly a home worthy of magazines and lavish parties, Mansion Royale becomes a dangerous shell of the splendid palace it had once been.

In this remarkable ode to survival, Cinelle creates something magical out of her truth—underscored by her complicated relationship together with her mother. Through a tangle of tragedy and betrayal emerges a revelatory journey of perseverance and strength, of grit and beauty, and of coming to terms with the cost of circle of relatives—and what it takes to grow up.

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