Book Review: The Butterfly Garden

The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 Maya has a story to tell. It's a horrible, frightening tale about a garden, filled with butterflies, cared for by a gardener.

Except the garden isn't some beautiful oasis. It's a prison. The butterflies are girls, kidnapped and tattooed with butterflies on their backs, renamed by a sick, twisted man they call the Gardener, who likes to keep pretty things for his own pleasure. No one knows where they are, no one knows what he does, until one day it all changes and the girls are set free.

The girls survived the horrors they faced but now comes the next part of their lives, trying to work to fit into a world that isn't sure where they belong anymore. Maya has survived the garden but now she has to face the task of telling the FBI about what happened to them, all the while trying to understand it all for herself. Is she telling them the truth, or is she only telling parts of it, and why, if she is, would she hide anything at all?

That was frightening and beautiful and disturbing and very nearly heartwarming.

But this book is probably not for everybody.
The main drawback I see readers struggling with is the pace and the writing style. This book is SLOW, it is a steady burn, like watching a match set a candle wick aflame and then watching the candle as it melts entirely until the only bit left is the sputtering flame. It will drive some readers batty because the action of the plot is in the discovery of past events, it is the slow, meandering unveiling of a horrible history for a terrified group of girls. The reader has to deal with the long, twisted riddles that lead character Maya offers as answers during an investigation. For some, the payoff at the end won't be worth it.

And that's just about the pace. The writing style goes hand in hand with it. The story unfolds with Maya in a room telling her story to two FBI agents. They ask her questions and then the story shifts to showing the reader Maya's answers as if they are happening in the present. Some of the answers don't make sense at first, many of the stories drive the agents crazy with frustration, but in the end, that framing of a story within a story allowed for the layers to be peeled back just enough, again and again, until the rhythm sucks you in. Either you will love this book, hate this book, or you won't have any sort of opinion for it at all, and it all depends on whether the answers Maya gives everyone make the reader care enough to hear the rest of the story.

Despite the subject matter of this book, which left a sour taste in my mouth, the characters are the real draw to this story. Every girl in this book was so well created that even though many of them were only in the book for a short time, they left deep impressions on the story. I found myself laughing at certain points in the end because I cared for these girls, and seeing that they were coming out of their despicable circumstances with pieces of themselves still intact made me smile. I felt relieved. That's unique for a book like this.

I loved that Hutchison didn't try to romaticize any element of her harrowing tale. Nothing was sugar-coated, or glossed over. The reality of this book was harsh, losses were suffered, pain was to be had from almost every direction. But the takeaway was hope and family. I might never actually read this book again but I will always think of it as a brilliant book.

If readers haven't already done so, and if they liked this book, they should go read A Wounded Name also by Hutchison. Her Ophelia is one of the best I've seen in print or film. I look forward to her next book, Roses of May, out in 2017 and tentatively suggested as a companion and a somewhat possibly continuation to this book.

Rating: 10 Stars. Nothing else to say about that I haven't already written in my review.