The Butterfly Lampshade

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Fiction / General / Bender, Aimee
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch, Traverwood Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Bender, Aimee	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Bender, Aimee	4-week checkout	On Shelf

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Loved this! submitted by lizgiessner on August 9, 2023, 2:26pm The memories and strange happenings make this story very compelling though there's not much "action". I loved the descriptions of yard sales, objects in general, and physical settings.