Plum Coyle is nearing fourteen, on the cusp of adolescence and experiencing all the physical awkwardness and turbulent emotions we associate with that age. She becomes friends with the beautiful, married woman next door, Maureen Wilks, who is also having an affair with Plum’s oldest and cherished brother, Justin. Maureen treats Plum with the respect she believes she deserves, listens to and understands her teenage complaints, compliments her, makes her feel safe and wanted. Her family, her parents and her two older brothers, share a sense of unspoken melancholy, a sadness that Plum longs to avoid. The family relationships – especially between Plum and her brothers Justin and Cydar – are so well-written, full of the playful teasings and silent affection. Justin and Cydar are great characters, I would have loved to know more about them – especially the mysterious, perpetually stoned brother Cydar – but essentially Butterfly is Plum’s story.

Plum Coyle has never been very happy with herself – she’s chumpish and she’s awkward and there’s something else wrong about her, some objectionable streak to her nature which means she’ll never be popular, things will go askew, she’ll frequently be misinterpreted. In her heart there are many admirable things, but it’s hard for these to wriggle through her thick skin of obtuseness. She’s tried and tried to be, for the world, the person she knows herself to be. She can’t do it though, it’s impossible. Time and again, that good person gets twisted about, or goes unrecognized. It’s exhausting, and it hurts.

Sonya Hartnett’s language is so evocative and precise, the dreamy imagery never straying too far from grounded reality. The friendship between Plum and her friends, their schoolyard gossiping and subtle actions are filtered through Plum’s understanding of them, there is meaning in their small gestures. Eventually these gestures become the grotesque and unsubtle cruelties of young girls at war with each other. The ear-piercing saga and her friends willingness to inflict physical pain on Plum is painful to read. Maureen, as always, is on hand to soothe Plum, offering the guidance of an adult while at the same time the close female friendship that Plum desires. At Plum’s fourteenth birthday party, the friends (and the reader) discover the totemic items Plum worships and uses for strength, trinkets and their stories having been stolen from the other girls. They shun her, deserting Plum to her shame. She steals these useless objects in order to feel closer to the girls, while knowing that she doesn’t like them much – the crux of her schoolyard friendships being the desire to belong. That is what Hartnett taps into so well with her writing in Butterfly, that unrelentingly painful need to belong, the search for a place to fit.

The words force the friends to the floor, six dissolving witches. They laugh because they’re sure they know everything able to be known and life holds no further mystery for them, not even about things they haven’t yet known and will not know for years – first touch, first defeat, nights shared, days forgotten, mistakes made, words unsaid, the saying of too many words. The heaviness of success, the grey valleys of loss, the clay feet of love, the greediness of time. Plum laughs because she can, it is so extremely funny; and because when they’re laughing at Caroline they are not laughing at her. Yet deep inside, a knot of disquiet ties up in her. Justin won’t marry Caroline – but other things will happen, and they will make Plum’s life, and Plum will have little choise about some of them, and no choice at all in many.

Maureen and Justin’s secret relationship is revealed to Plum and her horror of abandonment, of deep shame and loss, the feeling of having been used is possibly more deeply felt than the needles through partially numb ears. Plum turns her experience of cruelty onto Maureen, knowing what words are going to cut her the deepest, how to serve the harshest blow. There is an undeveloped suggestion that there is something deeper and more disturbing driving Maureen’s deceit – why, after being rejected by her younger lover, does she calmly inform his sister of their relationship?, letting her know of the plans that Justin had never really committed to? It seems that Maureen truly believes in what she is telling Plum, believes that if she tells someone else, it is all the more likely to happen despite what reality suggests. While Plum has her brothers to comfort and support her and their acts of selfless love to restore her faith in people, Maureen is ultimately left alone with her child, who is constantly calling for his forever absent father. It’s a heartbreaking image to end a novel on, but the full weight of Maureen’s plight is never the primary concern of Butterfly.

The writing in Butterfly is deliciously rich, the imagery reminded me of a toned down Francesca Lia Block, with a similar idea of the adolescent girl as a mythological creature. Hartnett is so acutely aware of the growing pains and insecurities of that particular juncture of life, Butterfly will induce cringes of recognition for those of us who have been there.