The Butterfly Garden by Sophie Anderson @Msophieanderson @bookouture #familysecrets #loss #renewal @absltmom

My review

At times, many times in fact, a broken heart is split apart because of a secret and keeping that secret encompasses one’s life and the type of pain that never leaves one.

For Erin, a young woman tarnished in her small town because of her affair with a married man, as she returns to Cornwall she, for a time, flounders at her parents’ home. She knows she is the subject of much gossip and while her heart is breaking, she realizes that the married man she loves, a painter, is never going to leave his wife and family. Erin needs something to do, to occupy her mind which is troubled, she takes up with Maggie, a reclusive cantankerous older woman, who is also carrying a secret that has plagued her for over thirty years.

Erin decides to stay at Maggie’s even if the reception is quite cool initially. She decides she will assist Maggie is completing her novel, sure to be her last as Maggie is dying. She finds through Maggie’s writing that she has a son, Lucas, who left so many years before, cutting off all contact with Maggie and she with him. Erin develops and attachment to Maggie and as she witnesses Maggie’s decline, she promises to seek out Lucas and persuade him to see his mother one last time. Tracking Lucas through social media, she finds him living in Costa Rica, and as a promise to Maggie she travels there to speak to Lucas.

Lucas, himself bears a secret that shatters his life and while Erin cajoles and begs him to come to Cornwall, Lucas is adamantly against it. As Erin scurries home, she wonders will she be in time to bid her friend goodbye before she passes? Will she finally be privy to a secret that her own parents have held from her? Can family ever be forgiven hen the hurt that accompanies the secrets might never fully heal?

This emotional story underlines the fact that a family secret can be the driving force as to why loving relationships fall apart. There are many sad happenings in the story, which are both heart breaking and ever so tragic. The story is nicely woven between the events of Cornwall and the beaches and beauty of Costa Rico. …and of course, there are the butterflies which bind mother and son with invisible wings.

I enjoyed this book and recommend it to those who enjoy a family drama that can be realistic and well written.

Thank you to Sophie Anderson, Bookouture, and Netgalley for a copy of this story due out June 21, 2021.

and here’s the author:

Sophie Anderson enjoyed a career in TV production in London before working with her husband to set up an online software business where she wrote the marketing content. But neither scratched that creative itch to tell a story, so she enrolled on a writing course and wrote her first novel The Butterfly Garden. She lives in Sussex with her husband, four children, a cocker spaniel and two cats.