Dot Hutchison Ruined Butterflies for Me (In a Good Way)

"Collectors don't let butterflies fly free. It defeats the purpose."

I stumbled across The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison (and the three following books in The Collection) completely by accident while looking for a new book club book, and was immediately gripped by the concept. The book is about, well, a butterfly garden by an isolated mansion. Except it’s not a normal garden. The butterflies that reside in this garden are young women with various butterfly wings tattooed carefully onto their backs. The Gardener, the man who runs the operation, kidnaps these girls in an effort to preserve their beauty.

However, we are not currently in the Garden when the book starts (perhaps something to be thankful for). Instead, we are oriented behind FBI agent Victor Hanoverian who is working with his partner, Brandon Eddison, to investigate what happened in the Garden by interviewing Maya, one of the Butterflies. Maya tells her story of the Garden throughout the book as the agents figure out what happened and what, if anything, Maya is hiding.

This book is hard to read sometimes, as the things Maya describes from the Garden are incredibly dark and disturbing. Especially as someone who was (at the time of reading) just a few months shy of 21 -- right around the age of the girls -- it felt deeply personal in some situations. And it was so fantastic to read. This book is a thriller, but it wasn’t “scary” in the sense that you’re worried about what’s going to happen next. In fact, the majority of the book takes place in the past, through Maya’s testimony, so there isn’t any fear of death or the unknown, like in typical horror stories. It makes up for the lack of immediate fear with just how unsettling it is. I can't even look at butterflies or tattoos of wings (or, God forbid, tattoos of butterfly wings) without seeing them as deeply sinister symbols. Hutchison took a symbol of beauty and completely corrupted it in the creepiest ways, and it was brilliant.

The thing that immediately made me fall in love with this book was the writing. This book is taking place in “current time,” which is around Halloween, and is told in the third person (again, oriented around Victor). Victor and Eddison are interviewing Maya, and most of the story takes place in the interrogation room within the context of their conversations. However, when Maya answers them, the book switches to her first person point of view. This allowed Hutchison to give Maya a significant amount of time to talk without it sounding completely odd -- people don’t talk in the same way one would write a narrative, but this way Maya was able to better balance between natural dialogue and proper book formatting. It also meant we didn’t have to sacrifice learning about Victor and Eddison, who carry us through the rest of the series. Hutchison actually uses similar style quirks (for lack of better phrasing) throughout the series in order to convey various feelings or ideas to the reader, and I think it’s incredibly effective every time.

I also just really loved the characters. The four books each focus on a different member of their FBI team: Victor, Eddison, their third teammate Mercedez Ramirez, and a new team member named Eliza Sterling that we meet later. For anyone who is a fan of the "found family" trope, these books will satisfy you there. These four characters and those they pick up along the way function as a tight unit, and we get to know them and all the side characters very deeply. And I loved the amount of nuance and care that was given to everyone. Most of the characters -- even the “bad guys” -- were complex characters that were compelling and interesting to read about. I wanted to keep reading mostly because I wanted to see how their lives would go, and I was genuinely wanted them to succeed.

As I’ve mentioned, there are three additional books that complete the Collection (which is the official name of the series). The Roses of May occurs four months after the Garden and focuses on Eddison and a girl named Priya Sravasti, whose sister was killed in the years prior to the book. Priya, her mother, and our FBI team have to catch her sister’s killer before things get worse. Next is The Summer Children, which focuses on Ramirez as a series of children are delivered on her doorstep being told that she will help them after their parents were killed by an angel. The case brings up dark memories from Ramirez’s past as the team works to catch the killer. Finally, The Vanishing Season focuses on Sterling as the team tries to solve the case of a kidnapping -- one that is a little too close to Eddison’s own past. They’re in a race against time to find the girl and figure out just how these cases are connected. Admittedly, I don’t think any of the subsequent books hit as hard for me as The Butterfly Garden did, but I still thought they were amazingly well done. When I finished them, I was genuinely sad to be leaving these characters and stories behind.

As a fan of mystery and thriller books, I was really into the cases presented throughout these books. Each of the “surface level” plots were very compelling and interesting to follow (even if some felt a little more obvious than others). However, the thing that made me fall in love with these books was all the deeper messages and themes underneath the plot. All four of the books covered characters and stories with such delicacy and nuance that I would be left thinking about them for days. Some of the themes explored were:

• Beauty and how a woman’s worth is determined

• How rich men will protect themselves and their reputation above almost all else

• What justice really is, and who it is really for

• The idea of purity and the expectations set on young women

• How our systems are flawed, even when they’re doing good things

• What really defines “family”

• How grief and loss can affect people

If I wanted to, I could write whole essays on each of these ideas and how they’re presented throughout the Collection. And, knowing me, I just might. But not right now. For now, I want to encourage you to go out and read these books. If you ever read a book because of me, I want it to be this series. Think about the stories, and think about what they mean to you. Give yourself a friendly fear of butterflies. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

From yours truly,

Kendall