ANGELA DAVIS-GARDNER

BUTTERFLY’S CHILD EDITORIAL REVIEWS

 “A richly imagined literary sequel to Puccini's Madama Butterfly…In its way, it holds its own alongside the modern Western masterpieces of Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy. For all its melancholy and madness, it strikes themes of hope and renewal, and believing in the unbelievable.”

—Kirkus Reviews

 

 

“Who ever thought the story was over? There was, after all, a child. Butterfly’s Child begins where Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly ends. Expansively imagined, carefully researched, and beautifully told, this is the perfect book for anyone who has ever longed to know what came next after that famous unhappily-ever-after ending.”

—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

 

 

“Secrets unfold like a Japanese fan in Butterfly's Child. With jewel-like prose, Angela Davis-Gardner has created an enchantment—a novel so beautiful, mysterious, and compelling that I had to stay up into the wee hours to finish it in one sitting.”

—Lee Smith, author of The Last Girls

 

 

“Brilliant and inspired . . . Butterfly's Child reveals, in ways both devastating and surprising, how the human heart and the world we live in are rarely as they appear. Once you enter Benji's world and begin his journey, there is no turning back and no slowing down."

—Jill McCorkle, author of Going Away Shoes

 

 

“I read Butterfly’s Child in one day, totally hooked. It is a captivating novel of love, guilt, sin, justice—and how all these things are, in time, transformed surprisingly and inevitably.”

—Josephine Humphreys, Southern Book Award–winning author of Nowhere Else on Earth

 

 

“An utterly fascinating and entertaining novel whose transcultural themes are particularly relevant today. It is also a deftly and lyrically written novel, well deserving of a wide readership.”

—Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

 

 

“Angela Davis-Gardner weds artful, beautifully sensuous prose to deeply involving, page-turning story. She’s among our best. Take the word ‘our’ in that sentence to mean everyone, anywhere—the whole human family.”

—Richard Bausch, author of Peace

 

 

“What happened to the son of Madame Butterfly, the tragic heroine of the operatic masterpiece? Davis-Gardner tells his enthralling story in a complex but tightly knit novel that is entrancing to read, beautiful to remember.”

—Fred Chappell, former poet laureate of North Carolina and author of I Am One of You Forever

 

 

“Butterfly’s Child is one of the finest books by a living writer that I have read in years. Davis-Gardner explores, with great tenderness, a boy’s search for family, and she moves between the American and the Japanese cultures in a way that both informs and involves the reader completely.”

—Elizabeth Cox, author of The Slow Moon

 

 

“Beautifully written and deeply stirring, this is a timeless rendering of marriage at its best and worst, of the lengths a parent will go for a child, of how one decision or action can roll on and on in its effects. Butterfly’s Child has the drama of an opera and the meticulous realism of a profound psychological novel.”

—Peggy Payne, author of Sister India

 

 

 

"A lovely, haunting novel, layered and beautifully written…I was captured by this book and couldn't put it down."

–Susan Richards Shreve, author of A Student of Living Things

 

 

“Amid the dullness and small mindedness of 19th century American life, Davis-Gardner's Japanese characters—especially the indomitable Benji—stand in bright contrast.  Davis-Gardner enlightens us with her subtle insights and startles us with one major surprise, in this touching story of an Asian mother who sacrifices everything for her child.”

—David Guy, author of Jake Fades and The Autobiography of My Body

 

 

“Immediately engaging…Though Davis-Garner (Plum Wine) inherited her characters, they are complex, dimensional beings in her hands.”

—Publishers Weekly