Book Review : The Butterfly Effect by Rachel Mans McKenny

Title : The Butterfly Effect

Author : Rachel Mans McKenny

Genre : Women’s Fiction

Publication date : 8 December 2020

I received this Advance Review Copy from Netgalley and Alcove Press in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you Netgalley and Alcove Press!!

Blurb

A feminist Man Called Ove meets Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project in this rollicking tale of a grumpy introvert, her astonishing lack of social conduct and empirical data-driven approach to people and relationships.

Is there such a thing as an anti-social butterfly? If there were, Greta Oto would know about it—and totally relate. Greta far prefers the company of bugs to humans, and that’s okay, because people don’t seem to like her all that much anyway, with the exception of her twin brother, Danny, though they’ve recently had a falling out. So when she lands a research gig in the rainforest, sh leaves it all behind.

But when Greta learns that Danny has suffered an aneurysm and is now hospitalized, she abandons her research and hurries home to the middle of nowhere America to be there for her brother. But there’s only so much she can do, and unfortunately just like insects, humans don’t stay cooped up in their hives either–they buzz about and… socialize. Coming home means confronting all that she left behind, including her lousy soon-to-be sister-in-law, her estranged mother, and her ex-boyfriend Brandon who has conveniently found a new non-lab-exclusive partner with shiny hair, perfect teeth, and can actually remember the names of the people she meets right away. Being that Brandon runs the only butterfly conservatory in town, and her dissertation is now in jeopardy, taking that job, being back home, it’s all creating chaos of Greta’s perfectly catalogued and compartmentalized world.

The Butterfly Effect is an honest tale of self-discovery, about the behavior of bugs (and people), how they can be altered by high-pressure climates, confused by breakdowns in communication, and most importantly, how they can rehabilitate themselves and each other.

Review

The Butterfly Effect by Rachel Mans McKenny is a story of a passionate Entomologist who loves Butterflies over humans. She is such an anti-social and never lets people near her. She is forced to return home from her research in Costa Rica because of her twin brother’s health issues whereas her heart yearns to be back at Costa Rica doing her research. So that’s how the story of The Butterfly Effect commence.

The idea and the basic plot-line of the story was really good and solid but the way in which the author had proceeded with the story was extremely poor and problematic. First of the all, character development of the protagonist Greta was agonizingly irritating. Even though her being an anti-social, the author could’ve given her some compassionate and innocent shade to her, at least on her personal space or thoughts. Basically Greta’s character was extremely selfish, judgmental and egoistic. All she cared about was her PhD and research, she didn’t even love her twin selflessly. Her behavior was very emotionally brutal towards others.

The author could’ve made her slightly likable so that the readers would be able to relate and empathize with her but that’s not to be. Because of this poor character development nothing in the book felt good or likable. Except for the lead character Greta, every other character in the book felt reasonable and good enough to be read about. But obviously they all lacked depth and that’s not a very good thing.

Secondly, the book was filled with a lot of scientific terminologies – the physiology of butterflies and ants. We get that the protagonist is an entomologist and she is crazy about it but the leaning on those parts way too much felt supernumerary. These unnecessary details could’ve been thoughtlessly avoided and as resultant the book would’ve been much more readable and enjoyable.

Even the narrative style and the writing style of the author wasn’t that good. So, basically reading this book was excruciatingly painful. There was no depth and there was no emotional connect, there was no proper justification in the book. And there was this Ex-boyfriend character of Greta, called Brandon, this character seemed completely useless. In fact his character had a lot of potential to play this plot changing capacity but he wasn’t used properly by the author yet again.

Though the book was fat and big, it failed to exhibit why Greta was behaving the way she was, why she hated her mother, why she was repulsive of human relationship and things like that at greater extent. It was all said way too hastily. The book spoke about all the trivial and unnecessary things in detail whereas failed to talk about the most crucial of things.

On the whole, the plot-line of the book was really nice and it had the potential to make a very good story if at all the author had included some depth and emotional content to it. The bad writing style and bad processing of the story made the book quite excruciating and unreadable.

My Views

I read the blurb and looked at this beautiful cover filled with lot of butterflies and I was immediately drawn towards this book. I thought it was going to be an interesting read but I so did not like it.

For a book to work for me, I should be able to relate to the characters and situations and be emotionally connected to it but this didn’t happen with this book. And that’s the first reason why I didn’t like this book.

I was completely disappointed with everything about this book except for the basic plot-line. I really thought I would love it but my bad!!

My rating for this book would be 1.5 out of 5 stars

This book didn’t work for me, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like it. Read the blurb and if you are interested, give it a chance.

Publication Date : 8 December 2020

Happy Reading Folks!!

~ Meenu