Blog Tour: The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez

I am thrilled to have Ashley Hope Perez on my blog today! Ashley is the author of What Can't Wait (which was just named to ALA's 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults list), and her newest novel, The Knife and the Butterfly. Ashley is going to share with you all how to handle characters and their flaws like a pro and also give you a taste of The Knife and the Butterfly with an excerpt from the book.

***

Ever want to reach into a novel, grab a character, and just shake him or her until there’s some sign of sense? Now imagine that you’re the writer, and you have to put up with a badly behaving character through the WHOLE process. Trust me, it’s not easy. But flawed characters are also fascinating, so they’re usually worth the struggle. In a second, I’ll serve up a short excerpt from The Knife and the Butterfly and tell you what I did to keep from throwing my characters out the window while I was writing. 

But first, let me get you oriented with a bit more about The Knife and the Butterfly:

Azael Arevalo wishes he could remember how the fight ended. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. He can picture the bats, the bricks, the chains. A knife. But he can’t remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars. Azael knows jails, and something isn’t right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.

Lexi Allen would love to forget the fight, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it’s time to testify. Lexi knows that there’s more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. Azael needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.

Didn’t my publisher do a gorgeous job with that synopsis? I’m so glad I didn’t have to write it. A summary that doesn’t give away too much = the most difficult two paragraphs ever. 

Here’s something I DID write, and it comes from Chapter 7 of The Knife and the Butterfly. Pakmin is Azael’s caseworker, and this is the first day that Azael has been sent to watch Lexi:

The same guard who picked Lexi up from the meeting room unlocks the door and lets her in. She throws herself onto the bed and says something, but I guess the microphones in her room aren’t turned on because nothing comes out of the speakers by the ceiling. I take a crack at this mind control thing to try to get her to change clothes so I can see her tits, but no luck. She lies there picking at her arm, like maybe she has a scab there or something. After a while, she reaches over to the desk and pulls out a spiral notebook and a pen. For a long time she doesn’t write anything, just pulls a piece of her hair into her mouth and sucks on it. Then she scribbles in the notebook for a while before she flops onto her side.

I get bored of watching her and keep thinking Pakmin has to come for me soon. I’m looking around the observation room, and I realize that the long wall opposite the one with windows onto Lexi’s side is also covered with mirrored glass panes. 

Maybe this is how the things look from the other side of the windows I’ve been looking through, and I’m guessing that Pakmin or somebody like him is probably watching me right now. Pakmin is watching me watching her. Waiting to see what the rat watching the rat will do. And maybe there’s even another row of windows behind that one, and somebody else is watching Pakmin watch me watch Lexi.

It makes me think of these bottles of drinking water my grams used to buy when she’d visit us. They had a label with a picture of a happy family carrying one of the bottles, which also had a picture of a family carrying a water bottle, and I imagined that that just went on forever. If you thought about it right, it seemed like you’d never run out of water because on every label there was a tiny water bottle with a tinier water bottle on it, all the way until you got to these little fairy-sized drops of water inside containers so small they’d be almost invisible. Or like how when you’re standing between two mirrors in just the right way you can see yourself shrinking into infinity.

So here’s the thing: Azael has this whole (very annoying) macho thing going on. And “I try to get her to change clothes so I can see her tits” isn’t even the worst of it. But there’s a lot of show to this; in fact, it’s kind of a performance that the reader will see fall away bit by bit as Azael gets caught up in bigger problems. Of course, I can’t tell the reader that yet, but I can let Azael have a semi-tender memory that makes him a bit more relatable. I mean, how fed up can you stay at someone who imagines fairy-sized drops of water when he looks at a water-bottle label? 

The point is, already there’s more to Azael than he himself recognizes. He’s got issues—no happy family in his recent past, for sure—and a fear of disappearing, of not mattering to anyone. So already his bravado turns out to be an attempt to compensate for something he feels like he’s missing. Don’t get me wrong: acting up is acting up, but we can take it a bit longer when we sense that there’s more to the story.

And what about the “more” to Lexi’s story? That comes later in the novel, when Azael gets his hands on her journal. But for now, let me just tell you that she doesn’t have angel wings, either. To get over my frustrations with her, I even gave her some of my own flaws, ones I could understand. For example, she can never make the care packages sent by her grandmother last more than a day or two, and she writes in her notebook, “when you’re stuck in a little room with nothing to do, how are you going to keep yourself from pulling that box out from under the bed and scarfing down another peanut butter cookie?” 

Listen, y’all, I so get this flaw. And I gave it to Lexi because it made it a little easier for me to relate to her lack of self-control in other areas of her life, too.

A reviewer recently called The Knife and the Butterfly “An uncompromising look at two characters most readers would otherwise look away from.” I’m not entirely sure he meant it as a compliment, but I think it is. Because one of the things I most wanted to do with The Knife and the Butterfly was to get readers to see two people who were deeply flawed as two people whose stories—and choices—still mattered.

I hope you’ll check out The Knife and the Butterfly and let me know what you think about Azael, Lexi, and their world.

***

Thanks so much for stopping by Ashley! I loved learning more about Azael and how you coped with your characters' flaws while writing the book.

More interviews, excerpts, guest posts, and secrets (including two truths and a lie) coming throughout Ashley’s The Knife and the Butterfly blog tour. See the full tour schedule here.

Ask for The Knife and the Butterfly from your favorite local bookseller or order it online. 

Can’t get enough? Check out Ashley’s blog, follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.