book review: Butterfly's Child by Angela Davis-Gardner
The backstory: When Jennifer Egan listed Butterfly's Child as her favorite read of 2011 , I knew I wanted to read it. The basics: In Butterfly's Child , Angela Davis-Gardner imagines what happens after Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly . (The novel opens with a synopsis of the opera.) Butterfly's child, Benji, goes to the United States with his father, Pinkerton, and his father's new wife, Kate. They live on a small Illinois farm. My thoughts: I knew nothing about Madame Butterfly going into this novel, but I found the premise fascinating aside from the opera: a half-Japanese half-white boy witnesses his mother's suicide, leaves Japan with his father and stepmother, both of whom are essentially strangers to him. To seem proper, the Pinkertons claim they are adopting the boy, but Benji knows the truth. What follows, initially, is a haunting portrayal of life on a Midwestern farm at the turn of the century. Benji longs for Japan. Pinkerton longs for a life no...