This book explores the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots at the end of the 20th century in America, a time of stock-market boom and working-class bust. "Colbert's words are like magic...it is her brilliant exploration of that no-man s land between what we desire and what we must live without that defines Colbert's deep empathy for her characters," writes fiction writer Kim Barnes in her advance praise of the book. Author Madison Smartt Bell writes that this "new episodic novel-in-stories is a jewel in both its form and its feeling, with layers of image and meaning as intricately patterned as the dust on a butterfly's wing."
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Evocative images of specimen butterflies, their broken bodies permanently suspended in time and pinned in place, suffuse Colbert's inventively interconnected stories of fragile yet defiant people whose lives immutably sway in a limbo between uncertainty and endurance. From Oahu's jade green hills and Honolulu's faded glamour to the psychological confinement of the Midwest's open spaces, Colbert's vivid array of characters are mired in place and desperate for escape that, once attained, is ephemeral and disappointing. Throughout, their stories of abandonment, betrayal, ambition, desire, loneliness, and redemption unfold through a series of odd coincidences. A teenage runaway moves in with the best friend of a missing-and-presumed-dead drug addict. The missing addict's grieving mother, once the best friend's lover, becomes a recluse, and unwittingly lures yet another addict's child to her death. Yet despite the oppressive, almost sinister, circumstances of their entangled lives, Colbert's incandescent protagonists manage to find a sliver of salvation, a glimmer of grace, through the timeless act of simply reaching out to another human being.--Carol Haggas, Copyright 2007. --Booklist
About the Author
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is also the author of Climbing the God Tree (winner of the Willa Cather Award in Fiction, and Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile (winner of the Zephyr Prize in Fiction). Her fiction has appeared in such journals as TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and New Letters. Originally from Hawai'i, she now teaches at SUNY-Binghamton University.
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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
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Dream Lives of Butterflies,
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This review is from: Dream Lives of Butterflies: Stories (Paperback)
This collection of interlinked stories is beautifully written. The writer evokes rich images that place you there, with her characters. This work is unique and extremely rewarding for the reader. I was sorry to reach the end. I wanted to know more about how life turns out for all of the characters in the book.
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