The Butterfly Clues by Kate Ellison

Title & Author:
The Butterfly Clues by Kate Ellison
Publisher:
EgmontUSA
Publication Date:
February 14, 2012
Pages:
336
Source:
NetGalley

Penelope (Lo) Marin has always loved to collect beautiful things. Her dad’s consulting job means she’s grown up moving from one rundown city to the next, and she’s learned to cope by collecting (sometimes even stealing) quirky trinkets and souvenirs in each new place–possessions that allow her to feel at least some semblance of home.

But in the year since her brother Oren’s death, Lo’s hoarding has blossomed into a full-blown, potentially dangerous obsession. She discovers a beautiful, antique butterfly pendant during a routine scour at a weekend flea market, and recognizes it as having been stolen from the home of a recently murdered girl known only as “Sapphire”–a girl just a few years older than Lo. As usual when Lo begins to obsess over something, she can’t get the murder out of her mind.

As she attempts to piece together the mysterious “butterfly clues,” with the unlikely help of a street artist named Flynt, Lo quickly finds herself caught up in a seedy, violent underworld much closer to home than she ever imagined–a world, she’ll ultimately discover, that could hold the key to her brother’s tragic death. – Goodreads

I have no idea why I put off reading The Butterfly Clues by Kate Ellison for so long. Because once I started it, I thought The Butterfly Clues was truly and wonderfully beautiful.

It’s so rare to find a protagonist who isn’t just weird-yet-still-endearing, but actually, truly, probably..I don’t want to say crazy, but maybe just that their world doesn’t make sense to us. We rarely read a book from the point of view of someone who thinks so differently. And The Butterfly Clues was just that – I couldn’t necessarily understand Lo’s sense of purpose in the collection of objects, but I was able to emphasize with her overall.

And the loss of her brother and her family’s way of dealing with the grief – it broke me. Lo’s treatment of her brother’s room and her dad’s reactions…I just thought The Butterfly Clues was such an interesting look at the grieving process and so heartbreaking.

Other than Lo, one of the main reasons The Butterfly Clues appealed to me is because I am such a huge fan of the mystery-solving-sleuthing teens. I love a good teen mystery – I must have read a billion and twelve Nancy Drew as a teenager book. And The Butterfly Clues? Has a damn good mystery, if I do say so myself. I did not solve it AT ALL (except for one teeny tiny thing I guessed at) and rather than feeling stupid, I was sucked in – I had to know who killed Sapphire, I had to know how Lo figured it out, etc.

The writing, also, was beautiful. Kate Ellison’s writing really allowed us to get inside Lo’s head and even though I don’t have the same urges as her, the way she was written made her so real.

Overall, I loved The Butterfly Clues by Kate Ellison. I thought it was a beautifully written story with an intriguing mystery and I loved trying to solve it with Lo.

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