A review by thehireader
The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

challenging dark sad tense

5.0

I really wasn’t sure going in about this book—I wasn’t sure if I would be able to handle how disturbing it was, especially after having had such a strong reaction to PRETTY GIRLS—but wow, it ended up being fantastic. Inara was an amazing character and I loved how the whole time, you were wondering just how reliable she was. 
 
I don’t always enjoy when books move between the past and the present but it was done so well in THE BUTTERFLY GARDEN. The way the story moved between the interview in the present and Inara’s account of the story in the past was seamless and kept me on the edge of my seat. And I appreciated how the author didn’t just spend the whole story building only to leave all the action at the end. Unlike so many thrillers I’ve read lately, the pacing was fantastic and the ending didn’t feel rushed and actually gave a sense of closure. 
 
This book is not for everyone and there are lots of trigger warnings. I appreciated, however, that the author never made it feel exploitative, and that the story was ultimately more about the characters themselves than the truly awful things that were done to them (or, in the case of the perpetrators, the awful things they did). 
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