Scan barcode
A review by justjoel
Butterfly Island by Corina Bomann
1.0
I received my copy of Butterfly Island via a Goodreads Giveaway, which in no way influenced my review.
I read this book to fulfill the prompt of “A book with an animal in the title” for the 2018 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge.
A beautiful cover enshrouds an absolutely horrible reading experience.
Diana is an attorney in Berlin who has just discovered her husband has been having an affair. While dealing with this revelation, she learns her great-aunt is in failing health, so she leaves for England to be by her aunt’s side without so much as a word to her husband.
On her deathbed (of course!), Diana’s aunt reveals to her that their family has a shameful secret in its past, and that there is a secret room in the family home where the mystery is housed, and that as the last living descendant of the family, it will be up to Diana to make things right once she has passed.
I’m all about secret rooms in elegant English manors, but this just started ridiculous and got worse as time went on. For one, there is little to no reason to suspect that Diana will be good at, or even compelled to, uncover the clues in the mystery, even when they are placed in her path by the family butler, who was given orders to do so by Diana’s great-aunt. If she had been a private investigator rather than an attorney, or if she and her great-aunt had enjoyed scavenger hunts or similar things when she was younger—any of that might have helped make sense of why her great-aunt chose to reveal the secrets in this manner instead of just saying, HI, hon, glad you could make it before I die. There’s something I need to tell you about our family before I go....”
But no, let’s drag this nonsense out over 400+ more pages.
The room’s revelation leads Diana to Sri Lanka, to a tea plantation owned by her ancestors over a hundred years before.
There, the nonsense continues anew, and she has a local, Jonathan Singh, referred to her by a mutual friend, as a guide and companion with whom to explore her family history as well as develop a romantic fascination with.
So, so many things are ridiculous here. There is the overgrown but still visible path they see in the garden, that they follow until they stumble on an abandoned building (not far from the plantation home, still on its property) and are able to deduce what purpose the place served, even though her ancestors were there over 100 years prior. Neither the current plantation manager, nor anyone else apparently has seen this building (somehow still standing after 100+ years of neglect), yet Diana and Jonathan see the path to it which was used by her ancestors over a century ago.
At one point, Diana finds a hidden letter that she thinks is from one of her ancestors. And despite feeling she needs to go home and return to her practice, she decides that yes, the letter might hold all the answers to the questions I need answered, but I’m going to wait until all other avenues have been explored and other options exhausted before I open this.
Why? Because apparently we needed 200+ more pages of sheer torture.
I thought at first that maybe the issues I was having with the book is that it is a translated work. I thought maybe the translator misinterpreted the original German text when she was translating to English, but no. This is just bad writing, period. The characters aren’t well-developed (although the ancestors we follow in the past show more than Diana), the plot has more holes than a fishing net, and the family secret should be (in modern times) no big deal.
I don’t even know what type of legal cases Diana’s firm specialized in, but I know I wouldn’t want her to represent me. I’ve seen smarter potatoes.
No interest in reading anything else by this author. My sincere condolences to the translator who had to read this tripe in one language and convert it into another. And my sincere apologies to the 793 people who entered the drawing for this book, but didn’t win. I’m sure one of you would have enjoyed this much more than I did.
1 out of 5 stars, because 0 isn’t an option.
I read this book to fulfill the prompt of “A book with an animal in the title” for the 2018 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge.
A beautiful cover enshrouds an absolutely horrible reading experience.
Diana is an attorney in Berlin who has just discovered her husband has been having an affair. While dealing with this revelation, she learns her great-aunt is in failing health, so she leaves for England to be by her aunt’s side without so much as a word to her husband.
On her deathbed (of course!), Diana’s aunt reveals to her that their family has a shameful secret in its past, and that there is a secret room in the family home where the mystery is housed, and that as the last living descendant of the family, it will be up to Diana to make things right once she has passed.
I’m all about secret rooms in elegant English manors, but this just started ridiculous and got worse as time went on. For one, there is little to no reason to suspect that Diana will be good at, or even compelled to, uncover the clues in the mystery, even when they are placed in her path by the family butler, who was given orders to do so by Diana’s great-aunt. If she had been a private investigator rather than an attorney, or if she and her great-aunt had enjoyed scavenger hunts or similar things when she was younger—any of that might have helped make sense of why her great-aunt chose to reveal the secrets in this manner instead of just saying, HI, hon, glad you could make it before I die. There’s something I need to tell you about our family before I go....”
But no, let’s drag this nonsense out over 400+ more pages.
The room’s revelation leads Diana to Sri Lanka, to a tea plantation owned by her ancestors over a hundred years before.
There, the nonsense continues anew, and she has a local, Jonathan Singh, referred to her by a mutual friend, as a guide and companion with whom to explore her family history as well as develop a romantic fascination with.
So, so many things are ridiculous here. There is the overgrown but still visible path they see in the garden, that they follow until they stumble on an abandoned building (not far from the plantation home, still on its property) and are able to deduce what purpose the place served, even though her ancestors were there over 100 years prior. Neither the current plantation manager, nor anyone else apparently has seen this building (somehow still standing after 100+ years of neglect), yet Diana and Jonathan see the path to it which was used by her ancestors over a century ago.
At one point, Diana finds a hidden letter that she thinks is from one of her ancestors. And despite feeling she needs to go home and return to her practice, she decides that yes, the letter might hold all the answers to the questions I need answered, but I’m going to wait until all other avenues have been explored and other options exhausted before I open this.
Why? Because apparently we needed 200+ more pages of sheer torture.
I thought at first that maybe the issues I was having with the book is that it is a translated work. I thought maybe the translator misinterpreted the original German text when she was translating to English, but no. This is just bad writing, period. The characters aren’t well-developed (although the ancestors we follow in the past show more than Diana), the plot has more holes than a fishing net, and the family secret should be (in modern times) no big deal.
I don’t even know what type of legal cases Diana’s firm specialized in, but I know I wouldn’t want her to represent me. I’ve seen smarter potatoes.
No interest in reading anything else by this author. My sincere condolences to the translator who had to read this tripe in one language and convert it into another. And my sincere apologies to the 793 people who entered the drawing for this book, but didn’t win. I’m sure one of you would have enjoyed this much more than I did.
1 out of 5 stars, because 0 isn’t an option.