Butterfly's Child: A Novel

I began reading Angela Davis-Gardner’s novel Butterfly’s Child in August 2010, on a family trip to Ireland. My expectation, honestly, was that I would dip in for a few pages and move on. I was comically wrong. In fact, I got swept up by Davis-Gardner’s tale to a point that proved disruptive to our trip: I found myself exhausted from staying up late to read it, trying to duck out of our sightseeing activities and continue. As my husband finally put it, “I feel like there is another person on this vacation.”

All the while, I asked myself: what makes this book so good? The first answer is evident from the very fact that I couldn’t put it down: the story hugely compelling. “Butterfly” refers to Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, whose mixed-race son Davis-Gardner follows back to America with his father, Pinkerton, and his American wife, after Butterfly’s suicide. Davis-Gardner’s historical research is effortlessly authoritative; her exploration of race in late 19th Century America is fascinating. But Butterfly’s Child is as much a study of gender as of race, and its portrait of the impact of Midwestern farm and family life on Kate, Pinkerton’s wife, is unforgettably poignant.

Best of all, Davis-Gardner unleashes a walloping surprise in the second half of Butterfly’s Child, upending the reader’s assumption that her novel is a mere re-imagining of Butterfly’s familiar tale, and revealing her deeper strategy: to coolly unmask the distortions inherent in dramatic mythmaking.

As a member of a book group, I can’t think of a better choice than Butterfly’s Child: compelling as catnip; bristling with ideas and questions and discussion points. It will fascinate and entertain its readers, and it will make some of them angry. In other words, it’s an excellent book.