I’ve loved books for as long as I remember. I devoured Goldenbooks the way most kids gobbled down candy. And it’s perhaps taken for granted that we all see ourselves reflected in the books we read, but that was not always the case for me.
- Welcome to the Monsoon UK website. Shop our women's, children's and wedding collections - all at Monsoon UK.
- Monsoon Mansion: A Memoirand millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir by Cinelle Barnes (2018, Trade Paperback) Be the first to write a review. About this product. Current slide 1 of 1- Top picked items. Brand new: lowest price.
The older I got and the wider I read, the less I saw myself in those narratives. The same names kept cropping up: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Salinger... and of course, they were and always will be great writers... but they painted a portrait of experience so far in perspective from mine they might as well have been C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.
It wasn’t for lack of trying to see myself on those pages. I even majored in English, so hungry was I in my quest. It wasn’t until I took an Anglophone literature class at Brown University that suddenly a whole new world of experience opened up. One where I could see myself and realized there were writers out there who understood that art reaches far beyond the Western canon. In fact, it goes deep into the East where the effects of colonialism could still be felt.
Arundhati Roy slayed me with her luxuriant words and epic love story in The God of Small Things; Zadie Smith taught me London street smarts with her witty ensemble masterpiece White Teeth, and of course, Amy Tan’s exploration of mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club made me realize it wasn’t just mine that was tiger-like. But it was my fellow Filipino writers who really delivered the elixir of self-recognition. Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters left me breathless, while Carlos Bulusan’s America Is In The Heart still, to this day, breaks mine.
That’s why I was so happy to discover Cinelle Barnes’ memoir Monsoon Mansion. It’s a true story about the author’s simultaneously magical and traumatic experience growing up in a once-glorious mansion, as part of a high society family... only to have her world (and literally her house) collapse all around her when tragedy struck her parents.
After the Gulf War decimated her father’s business, her father left, and a new, abusive man moved in. Things were never the same. Her mother’s slow descent into madness magnified the stripping away of the author’s childish innocence, and the house that once hosted mystical balls fit for a princess became squalid with gamblers and low lifes.
The saddest element of her story is that Cinelle’s mother, who must have loved her daughter in her own way, ultimately didn’t protect her and became complicit in her trauma. It was as if the abusive man cast a spell over the entire household as her mother inflicted plenty of pain on her daughter herself. Throughout the book, I wondered if their relationship could be saved from drowning in the monsoon, even as the author herself ultimately escaped... even though the monsoon is really her mother.
For me, Monsoon Mansion resonated so deeply because it became an allegory for my mother country. I saw my family leaving the lush, beautiful, troubled Philippines for the unknown of America. The once-glorious republic had descended into a gritty dictatorship, and no amount of atmosphere or magical thinking could spirit away the raids and the arrests and the unaccounted disappearances of those times. No memory of former splendor was enough for my family to endure a takeover of thieves. Things have changed now, of course. The mansion, as it were, has been restored, though people worry it is changing once again.
Monsoon Mansion was a warning tale, a recollection of a memory I never knew but my parents must-have.
Here is a truth often taken for granted by someone who has never needed to flee: immigrants do not want to leave home. But when your house crumbles, threatening to crush you, your family, everything you hold dear beneath it... there is nothing left to do but run and find a new place to call home.
Monsoon Mansion by Cinelle Barnes is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and local booksellers. Published by Little A, 2018. Disclosure: We are an affiliate of Bookshop.org and Conversational will earn a commission if you click one of the above links and make a purchase.
Book Rating (7)
Narrator Rating (1)
Unabridged Audiobook
Written By: Cinelle Barnes
Narrated By: Cinelle Barnes
Duration: 9 hours 2 minutes
Summary:
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 family's rise and fall from grace in the Philippines. It would take a young warrior to survive it.
Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother's opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father's self-made success, it was a girl's storybook playland. But when 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 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 price of family-and what it takes to grow up.
Monsoon Mansion Goodreads
Monsoon Mansion Cinelle Barnes
Genres:Monsoon Mansion A Memoir