This review will contain spoilers. 

The Butterfly Garden written by Dot Hutchison follows the gut-wrenching story of a teen girl who is trapped in a man’s fantasy garden. 

While the title sounds seemingly innocent, the book surprises you with page turning twists that show the acts that the Gardener commits to his captives. 

The book starts with two FBI agents, Vic and Eddison, interviewing Maya, one of the girls who was saved from the burning building. 

I enjoyed reading Vic and Eddison bicker in between questions. It added a comical relief to a frightening topic. 

Maya is one out of a few girls who were saved from this fire. As they gather more information on the girls, readers learn that Maya is actually Inara.

Inara then starts from the beginning with her childhood and events leading up to this point. She had a traumatizing childhood and faced serious neglect from her parents. 

I would have liked to hear more about her teenage years. She was living completely on her own and trying to find her place in the world at 15 years old, so hearing more about the struggle would have built Inara’s personality before her capturing a lot more. 

From what she narrated, we know that she had gotten a fake ID and had started working at a restaurant. We find out here that Inara wasn’t her birth name, rather the identity that she assumed. 

At said restaurant, she met a group of girls who all lived together. The girls found out that Inara had no place of residency, and offered her a place to live. 

This is where the Garden comes into play. 

Her capturers were simply guests at the restaurant who were a tad creepy, but nothing gave away to the readers that they were involved in anything sketchy, but after her capture, she wakes up in an unfamiliar room with a metal table. The only thing that she is able to see is another girl, later identified as Lyonette. 

Lyonette gives Inara the run down on the place. They are given new names, a tattoo on their backs of a butterfly, and they are not allowed to leave. 

Lyonette was, even from her first introduction, my favorite character. She takes all of the captives under her wing and gives them a piece of home throughout their stays. 

“The Garden” is where they are kept. The Garden is a building with a long hallway of rooms and a relatively large room filled with a garden-like landscape. 

Now, just as you think about how twisted things are here, it gets taken up another notch. 

Every girl got a tattoo of a butterfly as a part of the Gardener’s– the man who ran the garden– master plan. His father collected and preserved butterflies when the Gardener was younger, but they were all destroyed in a fire; however, the Gardener wanted to continue his hobby. 

He continued this hobby with humans. 

He never kidnapped the girls younger than 16, and he only kept them until 21. Once they turned 21, he killed them and preserved them. 

Where did he preserve them you may ask? The hallway walls lifted up and uncovered glass cases filled with resin, some filled with previous “butterflies” and others empty for future ones. 

This part left me nauseous and with my jaw on the floor. From the title of the book, I had no idea that this book was like this and had never really read thrillers before. 

What truly drew me in was the wall. Once I found out about this, I had to know what happened next. Were they secretly still alive inside of there? Would this turn into a supernatural story? 

At this point, no disturbing words would have stopped me from putting this book down.

Each girl had a different butterfly type tattooed on their back. It would have been interesting if the author gave more indication on how it was determined which butterfly was given to which girl. 

It remained a mystery as to how the Gardener killed the butterflies. 

They were given a new, colored dress to die in, contrary to the typical black dresses with the backs open to highlight their tattoos. 

After the author gave us a feel for what Garden living was like, she introduced us to the Gardener’s children, Desmond and Avery. 

Avery was a violent person who took it out on the girls, and as a result, his father often banned him from the Garden because of his behavior.

Desmond, however, grew to be one of my favorite characters. He wasn’t supposed to see his father’s work in the first place, and he had trouble understanding the full picture. 

He was nice to the girls, especially Maya, and tried to be their friends. Even after he found out the truth about everything that happened to them, he didn’t hurt them in the ways that his father and brother did. 

I enjoyed the way that Hutchison tied a love interest into this book. Even if it couldn’t be the innocent love story that Desmond and Maya wished it could’ve been, the story was fully rounded without Maya having a love interest. This plot development was an enjoyable one to read though. 

While the plot for their relationship was built up well, the entire idea of a relationship in the Garden in the first place is very twisted. The son of the capturer trying to be romantic with the butterflies feels more like he’s distracting himself from thinking about how horrible of a person his father is. 

It is not until much later that we learn that Desmond was the cause of the fire that the butterflies were saved from. The fire was his attempt to save them.

Once they were saved, we learned their true identities and about their families. 

While everyone else had thought that she was 18 at the time at her capturing, she was actually 16. Since it had been 2 years in the Garden, she was able to officially change her name to Inara. 

The ending of this book could have been played out better. It felt very crammed and there was nothing leading up to the big decisions that were made. 

Just as I was getting more sad about this book’s ending, though, I found out it was a series and immediately checked out the next book. I highly recommend this to anyone who loves thrillers.