“What is this place?”
“Welcome to the Butterfly Garden.”
I turned to ask her what that meant, but then I saw it.
The Butterfly Garden was a book club pick and it was presented as a mindless — but mind-blowingly twisted — read, and that sounded just fine for a lazy summer afternoon. But ultimately, it wasn’t even fine; this is bad. The writing — from the sentences to the overall plot — is amateurish and illogical, no character acts like a recognisable human being, and if this is meant to be a thriller, the “twist” that comes at the end is so not worth the journey. I see that author Dot Hutchison has turned this book into the first of a series, and I can also see that others on Goodreads have rated this highly, so I’ll just say: not for me. (Spoilery ahead.)
The techs tell him the girl on the other side of the glass hasn’t said a word since they brought her in. It doesn’t surprise him at first, not with the traumas she’s been through, but watching her now from behind the one-way mirror, he starts to question that assessment. She sits slumped in the hard metal chair, chin resting on one bandaged hand as the other traces nonsense symbols onto the surface of the stainless steel table. Her eyes are half-closed, deep shadows bruising the skin beneath, and her black hair is dull and unwashed, scraped back into a messy knot. She’s exhausted, clearly. But he wouldn’t call her traumatized.
The Butterfly Garden opens in an FBI interrogation room: a young woman — cuts and burns covered in bandages — has been whisked away from the hospital, and the two agents in charge of her will draw out her entire life story before arriving at the part, one day earlier, when she and a dozen other captive young women somehow made their way to freedom. The agents do know that these women were kidnapped, raped, and mutilated during their confinement, but they don’t like the way that this particular young woman “doesn’t look like a victim”: could she have been working in cahoots with the psychopath known as “the Gardener”? To get this “Maya” to open up, Special Agent Brandon Eddison will repeatedly pound his fist on the table and remind her that they’re the good guys working for justice here, and Special Agent in Charge Victor Hanoverian, the father of teenaged girls himself, will repeatedly send his partner out of the room to cool off and use his Dad intuition to read between the lines of Maya’s testimony.
In addition to information about Maya’s particularly horrific childhood and the relatively happy months living in New York City right before her kidnapping, we learn pretty early on that the Gardener is a rich and powerful man who captures girls (target age around sixteen), tattoos butterflies on their backs, forces them to live in a secret greenhouse on his mansion’s grounds, and expects them to be available for sex with himself and his sadistic adult son. Since we know that the captive girls eventually get free, the only thing that adds tension to the plot (beyond the discomfort of reading about rape and torture) is trying to figure out why these FBI agents are suspicious of Maya (and the eventual explanation is too stupid for me to even bother putting behind a spoiler tag).
As for the format: Perspective shifts back and forth between a third person limited focussed on Special Agent in Charge Victor Hanoverian’s POV during the interview, to Maya’s first person POV as she tells her story. And while this should be a good format for the material (with the reader learning what Victor is thinking about Maya as she talks, and then letting Maya have a more personal voice when describing difficult events), her sections often didn’t sound like someone giving testimony in an interrogation room:
At night the Garden was a place of shadows and moonlight, where you could more clearly hear all the illusions that went into making it what it was. During the day there was conversation and movement, sometimes games or songs, and it masked the sound of the pipes feeding water and nutrients through the beds, of the fans that circulated the air. At night, the creature that was the Garden peeled back its synthetic skin to show the skeleton beneath. I liked the Garden at night for the same reason I loved the original fairy tales. It was what it was, nothing more and nothing less. Unless the Gardener was visiting you, darkness in the Garden was the closest we got to truth.
I’ve read some good reviews that get into the implausibility of the Butterfly Garden itself but I have no energy for dissecting this book more than I already have — I wasn’t against the idea of a mindless read, but this wasn’t a fun escape (the rape of a twelve year old isn’t “twisted”, it’s gratuitous trauma porn), and ultimately, this was an affront to my taste and intelligence.
