Published by Harper Genres: Crime, Fiction, Mystery, suspense, thriller
Format: ARC, eBook
“Lost. You can be lost even when you’ve been found. You can make the wrong turn in life even if you’re surrounded by people who love you.”
The Butterfly Girl is the second in the Naomi Cottle a.k.a. the Child Finder series. It can be read as a stand-alone but I highly recommend reading the first book in the series, The Child Finder first as I found it to be exceptional.
In this book, Naomi is still looking for her sister while interacting with “street (homeless) kids” in Portland, Oregon. There she has learned that young girls have gone missing only to have their bodies found in the river some time later. Naomi wants to dedicate her time to locating her sister but can’t resist the pull of the homeless teens -especially a teen named Celia. A young teen who hopes one day to visit the butterfly museum and save her own sister. Each identifies with the other.
“…the stories we tell ourselves have more meaning than the facts. That doesn’t make them lies. Seeded with every myth was the emotional truth.”
I found Denfeld’s writing to be lyrical, poetic and beautifully poignant. She doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects and gently places them in the readers face. Reading about homeless teens, crimes against children and what one needs to do to survive on the streets might be difficult, but we can’t pretend these things do not exist. They exist more than we even know or may want to acknowledge. In her acknowledgements section, she writes with admiration and love for the librarians in Portland, Oregon who cared for her when she herself was a homeless kid. How public libraries and books saved her. She writes from a place of familiarity and personal knowledge.
Besides her deep and personal knowledge about the subjects she writes about, she writes using beautiful descriptions and imagery. The words, like the butterflies, flew off the pages, flew over my head and gracefully landed back on the pages. Riveting, captivating, thought provoking and suspenseful, this one had me from page one. With two plot lines going on at the same time, I usually prefer one over the other but in this case, I was equally invested in both and thoroughly enjoyed how she wove them together. Plus, how about that beautiful cover!
Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.