The Butterfly Cabinet

Title: The Butterfly Cabinet

Author: Bertie McGill

Publisher: Free Press (July 2011)

Genre(s): Historical Fiction

Length: 240 pages

Synopsis: Based on the true story of a child’s death, a family secret decades old is slowly revealed from the perspective of two very different women.  Half the story comes from the prison diary of Harriet Ormond, convicted of murdering her own daughter, and half from the child’s nanny, Maddie.  It is only in the intermingling of these two perspectives that a truth no one ever guessed at comes to light, seventy years too late.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:

Nothing is what it seems in this novel.  A child found dead, strangled on the restraints used for punishment.  A mother convicted, imprisoned, and broken.  A servant who cared deeply for the children she tended.  It’s a façade as smooth and seamless as the wings of the butterflies Harriet Ormond keeps in neatly pinned rows in the drawers of her butterfly cabinet.  Her “pieces of sky,” she calls them.  It is an apt collection for a woman most at home under the open sky and a window into her suffering during the year she is imprisoned for her daughter’s death.  Harriet is painted as a harsh woman, cruel and unfeeling, and in her diary, her own words are not self-pitying.  They are, however, revealing.  Another side of Harriet comes to light between the lines of her prison diary, a side at which even her family did not guess.  Her counterpart, the woman everyone knows as Nanny Maddie, has her own secrets.  She’s kept them nearly for seventy years, and haunted by things left unsaid, her story at last is told.  There are no villains in this novel, and though readers will find themselves trying to fit characters into that mold, no one is easy to hate or to love.  The book does take a bit to hit its stride; the back-and-forth through time and space takes some adjustment on the part of the reader, and there are quite a few minor characters to keep track of.  Once the voices of these two women are established, however, their stories grow only more heart-wrenching with every turn of the page.