The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York
Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous,
poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the
fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world
On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a
psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her
babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her
aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's
sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie
spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating
in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see.
Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment,
and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a
school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her
recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her
certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her,
and what they say about her own place in the world.
As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world
to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality.
The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood
perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The
question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this
power survive childhood?
Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle
to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very
existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and
heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the
material world, and a broken love between mother and child.
