Review: Tinfoil Butterfly

Review for "Tinfoil Butterfly" by Rachel Eve Moulton (2019)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

A bizarre book that reminds me less of a novel and more of a David Lynch movie.

As this story begins, a late adolescent girl named Emma is attempting to escape her past by hitchhiking to The Badlands of South Dakota. She is picked up by a man named Lowell who tries to violently kill her. She gets the best of him and escapes, driving to an abandoned diner in the Black Hills mountains. Emma wakes the next morning in the diner to find a boy wearing a tin foil mask with a gun pointed at her. The boy introduces himself as Earl and says that his mother is dead and he will help her, but she must help him bury his father first.

I know, I know…it sounds crazy, but all of this happens in the first 30 pages or so. The rest of the book is a mass of twists and turns and flashbacks to past traumas. There is never a dull moment in this book or a period where you can rest assured that the two main characters are ok. Earl and Emma come to love and trust each other and I really liked that about this book, emphasizing that it is not so much about the trauma but the hope that two damaged people can find in one another.

I definitely recommend this, if you don’t mind writing with surreal elements and books about how people deal with the bad things that happen to them.