Thank you dearauthor for the review. I probably wouldn’t have come across it if not for your glowing recommendation. You have yet to steer me wrong.

Had I heard of the book, I wouldn’t have read it, because it sounds crazy depressing and unrealistic.

Now that I’ve read the book, I’m having a hard time with every other book I read because it just doesn’t measure up to Deidre Knight’s style in Butterfly Tattoo. I find everything else just so contrived and melodramatic.

Keep writing Ms. Knight. I look forward to it!

As is sometimes the case when I read a review by Jane, I have to agree to disagree. We agree on Ms. Leigh, though. (^.~)

To the reviewer: I too wondered about why Rebecca kept referring to her attacker as Ben rather than something else more impersonal.

Spoiler Alert:
That was until the end when she discusses her attack with her mother. It is clear that Rebecca has forgiven her attacker and even feels sorry for him. And in a way she even blames herself for this man’s illness. You even get that sense when Michael is wondering how she can forgive someone when he still can’t forgive the man who killed Alex.

End of Spoiler.

There are so many levels in this book that it isn’t in anyway a standard romance novel. It is more a novel about love and forgiveness and trying to survive, move on and in a way be reborn after something horrible has happened to you.

Really I encourage everyone to give it a try. Please don’t let the fact that Michael had a long term love affair (marriage) with a man turn you off. Their love is every bit as powerful as the love he has for Rebecca and shows you how love really does transcend everything.

I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, all of the positive reviews on this book have been amazing and gratifying, for a book that breaks the mold. Thank you for posting!

Interestingly I saw an Oprah Show earlier this week about Sexual Fluidity.
The entire show was about loving the individual regardless of what sex the person is. So to read Butterfly Tattoo so soon after seeing her show really emphasized to me how important Love is rather than the labels we attach to the person we love.

I have noticed this book is catagorized on many sites as being erotica. I don’t want anyone to think this book is nothing but sex. In fact I found it to be very light on the sex part (very very light) and very heavy on the emotional aspects of love. Not just sexual love either. There is love between parent and child, best friends, siblings, etc…

It definitely will make you cry and maybe even make you come to understand how deep loves goes beyond the physical.

I highly recommend it to anyone. And I normally don’t even read contemporary novels and I am not a fan of first person. But this author won me over.

Truth be told, I’m exceptionally thankful for the average days that kept “Butterfly Tattoo” at the top of my TBR until this last week because I think if I’d read it earlier, parts of this wonderful, horrible, amazing, dark, joyous, crushing, beautiful book might not have moved me as deeply and hopefully as they did.

Onto my ‘review’, *g*.

“Open up your heart and see where it leads.”

These words of advice, and love, offered by Alex Richardson to Michael Warner early in their relationship are truly the spine of this tale. For me, Ms. Knight’s story, in the end, had only a passing dalliance with relationships, sexuality, or even the points at the heart of the novel, life and death and living. As I read the last sentence in “Butterfly Tattoo”, that single line about open hearts, above all others, resonated with me as the point of the whole book. That an open, honest heart can save, restore, and guide more truly than anything else on this earth.

Michael is hurting, lost, alone, angry, all those emotions we feel when someone we love, we adore, is torn from us without warning. He’s floundering in a world that seems so utterly wrong without Alex (his soul mate, best friend, and lover for more than a decade). With Alex gone, Michael is trying, struggling furiously in fact, to find his way to the light of living. Not so much for himself, but for his daughter, Alex’s daughter, Andrea. His precious baby is snared, perhaps more deeply than any, in a tide of grief and isolation, unable to free her tiny body from the undertow. And despite the support of family, friends, counselors, etc. neither Michael nor Andrea are having much luck allowing life back inside their hearts.

Then a chance electrical short brings a wounded, and broken, Rebecca O’Neill into Michael and Andrea’s lives. Oh, on the outside Rebecca seems to moving forward, the scars from her tragic assault have faded and she’s still in the Hollywood business, still wheeling and dealing. She’s simply out of limelight. Except she hasn’t just given up her dream of acting, she hides away from light, from life, going only as far as necessary to get what needs doing done before retreating once more into the dark. But tiny Andrea, who bears silvery scars of her own, reaches out to Rebecca and Rebecca can’t stop herself from reaching back. Except with the reaching comes the gripping of fingers, then hands, and arms, and bodies and soon, Rebecca finds herself in a tangle of fear and uncertainty, of love and hope.

And that’s where the book starts, ends, and flows through the middle.

I’m exceptionally glad that I read this book. There are so many things going on, so much minutia, ‘subtext’ as it were, that I really felt as if I were reading non-fiction at some points. The characters, the situations, so real and true to life that as a reader, I couldn’t help but laugh when they laughed, be angry when they were angry, cry (okay at a couple of points nearly sob) when they were hurt and aching.

And at the end, I knew that all the hearts wound so close in the novel were open and following loves lead. And that’s about the happiest ending anyone can possibly want, if you ask me.

Earlier this week I received Ms. Knight’s email newsletter, which included a link to an excerpt of the story, and after your stellar review, Jane, I went to the trouble of clicking on that link. I was immediately sucked into the story and had to buy it. This was the first full length novel I read entirely on my iPod – I did it in two days, and boy, are my eyes sore. I’d have done it in one, but the battery ran down. This was a definite keeper, and I’m hoping it’s coming out in print somewhere down the road, so I can put a copy on my bookshelf.

I loved these characters – each of them seemed so real and complicated and utterly authentic. It’s a beautiful, quiet, unconventional story about a trio of emotionally damaged people who are redeemed by their willingness to love. That sounds so magnificently corny, and I admit it, I was sobbing through much of the second half of the book. But in a really good, cathartic way.

Thanks, Jane, for calling our attention to Butterfly Tattoo, and thanks to Samhain for publishing it.

Oh, I see. So the girl's mum was out of the picture before the accident.

Nope. I think you should read the book. It’s a great book, I promise :P

You mean her mummy. I read a couple of pages online and I liked it.