THE BUTTERFLY MIRACLE

A young woman deals with the aftereffects of sexual assault.

Life is looking good for the character Michelle Halliwell at the beginning of author Michelle Halliwell’s debut novel: She’s attractive, gets excellent grades, and is the girlfriend of the high school’s star quarterback, Booker Price. But things quickly turn sour. Booker wants more from her sexually than she’s willing to give, and they part after a fight. The fighting continues when her mother, seeing her disheveled appearance, thinks the worst about what happened between her and Booker. And when she sneaks out later that night to go see him, things get even worse: She finds him with her best friend. This unlikely piling up of one melodrama on top of another continues when she later attends a frat party as an act of revenge and the party is raided. She isn’t arrested, but she falls into the clutches of an older man who drugs and rapes her. She finds a bit of comfort in the friendship of the school nerd, but it looks like she might be facing her future alone. Since she’s by far the main character in the novel, Halliwell’s treatment of her will raise questions in many of her readers. As a character, Michelle frequently describes herself as a good Christian, but she seldom acts that way. For example, she taunts one school gossip by telling her, “You’re only popular when you spread your ugly-little-pig legs.” This mean streak extends to her thoughts even when she’s not being taunted (her reactions to a friend’s suicide, for example, are largely horrifying), and it results in an unsympathetic portrait of a character with whom readers are clearly intended to sympathize. Michelle’s shortcomings as a main character aren't offset by the book’s secondary characters, all of whom are thinly drawn. Halliwell writes with a readable directness, but this can’t remedy the void at the heart of her story.

A stilted portrait of a young woman dealing with faith and personal crises.