Hello, bibliophiles! Happy hump day! After so much time working on this website for all of you, I’m glad I took so long to bring you something new. I’m sorry about that, but life just got in the way of my reading, and I just couldn’t seem to get any down time to really get sucked into a book. Anyway, I finally finished my latest read, and I’m excited to tell all of you about it! It’s The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison. This book popped up on my Kindle as a suggestion of something I may like, and after reading the blurb, I was hooked and had to hit that “one-click” option so I could start reading immediately.
There’s something about a thriller or a disturbing tale that lures me right in hook-line-and-sinker. I think it has something to do with the, “oh my god, what happens next!?” factor. This was one of those books. I’m only sorry that my schedule didn’t allow me to sit and binge on this story as I would have liked, and instead, I had to drag this out over a week’s time.
The Butterfly Garden reminded me a bit of House of Wax or something along those lines as far as level of freaky and unsettling. I instantly met Maya who is in police custody after a crack in a new case. Through her recollection, I learned what it was like to live in The Garden as a butterfly and be tended to by The Gardner.
I was horrified for what Maya and the rest of the girls in The Garden had to go through. What do you do when you know you’re doomed to die on your 21st birthday, or if you’re injured, fall pregnant, or get sick? The Gardner grows and cultivates his butterflies, tattooing the wings of a different one on each of their backs. He basks in their beauty and their youth, but everyone knows that butterflies don’t live long, especially in captivity.
The encounters Maya describes to authorities are horrifying. One by one, it seems each of her friends is taken from her, only to be found days later, frozen forever behind a glass wall. The butterflies she spends her days with are the ones who wind up watching over her and new girls as they’re brought into their prison.
The scariest part was the fact that The Gardner didn’t seem to think he was doing anything wrong when he murdered these girls. It’s those killers that are the most deadly. He felt his actions came from a place of love and affection, and he just wanted to preserve their beauty for all eternity. It’s when he starts choosing girls who are too young, that his years of planning for his garden start to cave in on him.
As I said, even though it took me longer than I would have liked to finish this story, I loved every captivating minute! An absolute thrill ride from start to finish!
My Final Rating: five out of five stars
