Amanda
thinks her life is fine—or at least as fine as it can be when she’s not
following her dream of being an artist and is instead advising clients on what
to do with their money. She thinks that that her life is fine except that she
can’t seem to make her husband happy, and on top of that…she’s having
premonition dreams. Her life is fine but she doesn’t have those dreams unless
her life is a mess. And soon enough, real life catches up with her dreams.
BUTTERFLY
BONES is a terrific novel about dreams, both literal and metaphorical. It is
about a complicated woman living a complicated life. The genre straddles the
line between chick lit and lit fic with a dash of paranormal thrown in and
Savanna Redman makes it all work because her writing is just that good.
For one
thing, from the opening page as Amanda experiences a lucid dream, we’re thrown
into a multi-sensory world, seeing the shadow of black branches against a
violet sky, hearing the buzz of insects, smelling the scent of honeysuckle,
feeling the chill of cold dew om our bare feet. And from the first pages we
also know that Savanna may long for a normal life but she is ANYTHING but
normal.
And yet the
author has given Amanda a very real context—friends, a job, coworkers, clients—that
makes the ghosts and the dreams that much more plausible. There’s a specificity
to the details—one client does nothing but complain that he can’t get his hands
on his entire trust fund, another complains about having to pay for parking.
And Amanda is caught in the middle, wondering if she can afford a quick trip
from Chicago to the Caribbean to grab some sunshine.
This is a
surprising book. As the story unfolds, it expands, brought alive by Redman’s
beautifully vivid writing. Amanda relates how she feels when “a word hits with
the force of an arrow with a bone-splitting fixed blade broadhead” and we know
EXACTLY how that feels. This is the first in a series, and once you’ve read
this one, you will be so so pleased that there are more books to read.
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