The Butterfly Clues by Kate Ellison
My rating: 3/5 cats
okay, if i had to rate the ending on this one, it would be an easy 2 stars cats.
it was a little too “what about prom, blane?” for me.
the rest of it was good, if not amaaaazing.
you know the story – girl with ocd (tippity tapping, magic word muttering, irresistible kleptomania, hoarding) deals with the death of her brother, the retreat of her mother into a bedroom-cave of pills and denial, and her father into a workaholic tornado, by exploring the outskirts of cleveland, and finds herself caught up in a mystery involving strippers, an enclave of homeless teenage artists, drugs, money, power, magical numbers, and murrrrder.
some good stuff in here – a sympathetic protagonist, (her scene in the police station in which her condition is misdiagnosed and dismissed as the twitchings of a drug addict is especially heartbreaking), some claustrophobic scenes with her rearranging her possessions until they are “just so.” and some really touching scenes between herself and her parents really buoy this up a bit.
and the treatment of her condition is sensitive and consistent, and the constant reminders of her impulses really give you the sense of someone living with the disorder.
Here’s the thing: I don’t choose to take things. I have to. I’ve always had to do certain things, since the day I turned seven and began to insist that I wanted to stay six. I didn’t know why, but seven felt off, somehow, made me feel like the world was tilting too much to one side. It wasn’t so bad at first. Just little things—like the way the food looked on my plate, or needing to eat peas before chicken, or needing to put the left shoe on before the right. I started taking little things—a toothbrush or a candy bar from a store, discarded ticket stubs from the movie theater, stickers from the kids at school.
But since Oren disappeared, it has gotten worse. A lot worse. Now, when the urge comes on, it’s like this superhuman force that grips my body and won’t let go until I have the thing I’ve spotted, the thing I need. And it’s not the taking or the stealing I crave, it’s the having and the keeping. Forever. With me. Safe.
i mean, that’s just perfect, isn’t it? we all have our compulsions and our magical thinking, and it makes sense for her to get sucked into her impulses, given her circumstances; they seem logical in this context.
but so her new obsession is finding out who killed a teen-stripper named sapphire, at whose murder lo was unwittingly on the other side of the wall from. and it turns into a quirky nancy drew-type situation with disguises and break-ins and posing as a wanna-be stripper under the guidance of a dreamy homeless boy in a bear cap who sees her for what she is and opens her eyes to a whole world and blah. can we talk about smells again? because a homeless boy living in abandoned buildings should never smell like pine and cloves and snow and whatever else he is supposed to smell like. that is just crazy-talk. not enough to ruin a book, but let’s just be realistic here, okay? homeless teenage boys do not smell good. regular teenage boys do not smell good. end of discussion.
this is a perfectly serviceable mystery story, with a bit of the stretching the boundaries of plausibility (seriously, cleveland police, step up your game), which is saved from mediocrity by the welcome addition of the difficulties of a young girl with an anxiety disorder.
but ultimately, just okay.
