A review by onemorepagecrew
The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchison

4.5

The Butterfly Garden by Dot Hutchinson was not on my radar until Erica (@wittyreading) shared it to her feed.  She reads creepy, disturbing books and I get a lot of my recs from her, so naturally I was curious.  It’s under 300 pages so we buddy read it quickly and it held my attention start to finish. 
 
In this story, we meet Maya who is a key witness helping to explain what happened in a place where she was held captive.  The story is told primarily through her flashbacks and recounting and it’s quite effective at building a very slow, creepy setting.  Her personality and voice were probably my favorite part of the book, and the audio edition really added to the effect. 
 
This book was published in 2016 and is classified as horror, but it’s not heavy on body horror or gore.  It’s more of a slow, terrible situation that you become enmeshed with as a reader.  The whole book takes place in awful circumstances, but the young girls and women in the book are written with such depth that I wasn’t wincing or tense reading it.  The sadness was palpable throughout the whole thing, and I just wanted to know more about their story and see them to the end. All in, this is a solid choice if you can handle a terrible concept (kidnapping and holding young girls / women captive) with a methodical unveiling of how it all went down. 
 
Content warnings: kidnapping, sexual assault, self-harm 
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