The Butterfly Cabinet
A Novel
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3.9 • 23 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“An emotionally bracing, refreshingly intelligent, and ultimately heartbreaking story” (Kirkus Reviews) of two women linked by a tragic, decades-old secret.
When former nanny Maddie McGlade receives a letter from the last of her charges, she realizes the time has come to unburden herself of a secret she has kept for more than seventy years: the truth behind the death of Charlotte Ormond, the four-year-old daughter of the wealthy household where Maddie was employed as a young woman.
Weaving together Maddie's confessional to Anna—the would-be niece of the deceased Charlotte Ormond—and the prison diaries of Charlotte's mother, Harriet, who had been held responsible for her daughter's death, a vivid tapestry of the complex Ormond family history begins to form. Maddie also details her own life, marked by poverty, fear, sacrifice, and lies—a stark contrast to the wealth Harriet describes in her diaries, though not without its own troubles. A strict mother with her own repressed desires, the community was quick to condemn Harriet when Charlotte dies, allegedly as the result of Harriet’s punitive actions. Unwilling to stoop to defend herself and too absorbed in her own world, she accepts the cruel destiny that is beyond her control even as, paradoxically, it sets her free.
Based on chilling events that actually took place in the north of Ireland in 1892, The Butterfly Cabinet is a sterling example of dark, emotionally complex fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based loosely on a late-19th-century Irish murder case, McGill turns her gothic debut about the death of a young girl tied up alone in a room as punishment into an exquisite series of painful revelations. In the late 1960s, the pregnant Anna visits her old nurse, Maddie, who four decades before was a housemaid at the Castle at Oranmore. As Maddie reminisces, the viewpoint shifts between Maddie and her harsh employer, butterfly-collector Harriet Ormond, imprisoned in 1892 for the murder (accidental death, she claimed) of her four-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and later pregnant again with a daughter who would become Anna's mother. With the butterflies, pinned and displayed, serving as metaphor for the constricted lives of both Harriet's tightly disciplined children and Harriet herself, trapped in motherhood and frustrated by the unruly young Charlotte, McGill easily recreates the lives of the Castle's owners and servants and the intricate connections between them. As both Harriet and Maddie's stories emerge, the tale becomes a powder keg of domestic suspense that threatens to explode as long-kept secrets surrounding Charlotte's death are teased out.
Customer Reviews
Dark story
Excellent writing