Heather Colley

The blurb for The Gilded Butterfly Effect is a bit misleading. I can see the comp to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation but not Mona Awad’s Bunny. This wasn’t similar to Bunny at all. Bunny is a book that I would classify as funny, surreal horror in an academic setting. I didn’t find The Gilded Butterfly humorous, and I don’t think it’s meant to be; it felt very serious (and depressing) the whole way through.

After reading, I would describe The Gilded Butterfly show more Effect as purely literary fiction in a college setting.

The writing quality was solid on a technical level (Heather Colley has an impressive vocabulary!). However, it was difficult for me to tell the voices of the various narrators apart from one another, and as a result I would easily lose track of whose chapter I was on while reading. We know the characters are different from one another because we’re explicitly told so, but I struggled to actually feel it.

The story itself has very low stakes, which made it difficult to keep my attention as a reader. The characters themselves don’t feel particularly strong, which made me struggle to get invested in the story, too. For me, the biggest problem with the book is that it doesn’t have enough of a plot.

The Gilded Butterfly Effect will work best for readers who don’t mind books that lack a strong plot, and are looking for books that feature stream of consciousness narrators.
I think fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation who are looking for a similar sort of book might also like this. It also reminded me a little of the HBO show Euphoria, so fans of Euphoria might want to check it out as well.

Thanks to LibraryThing and the publisher, Three Rooms Press, who sent me a physical ARC to review. show less

I love a campus novel. Unfortunately I didn't care for this at all. It feels like an authentic snapshot into sorority life; that said, it is a snapshot that confirms rather than subverts stereotypes about that life being vapid, vacuous, and at its core, boring. How many decades must we continue to suffer through sorority girls doing cocaine and missing any character arc?

There are two main narrators, Stella and Penny, and they sound exactly the same. This is a true pet peeve of mine in novels show more with rotating narrators. Stella and Penny sound the same, think the same, and observe the same details about their environment. They shouldn't! It doesn't make sense for their purported characterization.

Sigh.

Not recommended. show less

This book follows sorority sisters and frat boys, and stories set in a college campus tend to be hit-or-miss for me. The story failed to hook me, and if the ending was meant to evoke emotion, it just didn't do it for me. I'm not sure if I'm just outside of the target age range or if it's because I couldn't relate to this version of the college experience, but this book didn't do it for me.

I do agree that this book would do well with fans of "Bunny," I did feel the similarities there.

Gimme, gimme, gimme!!!