When They Burned the Butterfly
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this fierce, glamorous adult fantasy debut, Silvia Moreno-Garcia meets Fonda Lee, with the feverish intensity of R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy.
Singapore, 1972: Newly independent and grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters in Chinese secret societies are the last conduits of their ancestors' migrant gods, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place magic has not been assimilated and legislated away.
Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight—a girl with a butterfly tattoo—she discovers she’s far from alone.
Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline’s mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she’s dead, Adeline’s bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother’s killer and the gang’s succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls’ dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.
But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Substance gets transported to 1970s Singapore in YA author Lee's gruesome and evocative adult debut (after The Dark We Know). Contrarian teen Adeline Siow inherited her mother Kim Yen's ability to summon fire at will, but resentfully lives by her mother's rules to keep these blazes small and secret. She gets her thrills picking the pockets of customers in her mom's clothing store and snooping into Kim Yen's secrets, like her ties to the White Orchid bar, a haunt of the Red Butterfly gang. There, Adeline sees and becomes infatuated with gang member Ang Tian. After a mysterious fire destroys the Siow home and Kim Yen is burned alive, Adeline learns that her mother was the Red Butterfly's leader. She tracks down Tian, joins the Red Butterflies, and feels a sense of belonging for the first time. Danger arises, however, from rival gang Three Steel, which has begun dealing strange pills that promise to make users beautiful but just as often transforms them into monsters. Adeline is a well-drawn but challenging heroine who constantly lashes out at everyone around her, and the close third-person POV from such a relentlessly prickly perspective can be wearying. However, those seeking a purposefully unlikable narrator and blood-drenched body horror will find much to enjoy. Lee should win a new set of fans with this.
