Book review: The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope Perez

Title: The Knife and the Butterfly

Author: Ashley Hope Perez
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Publication Date: February 1, 2012
Pages: 216

From Goodreads:

After a marijuana-addled brawl with a rival gang, 16-year-old Azael wakes up to find himself surrounded by a familiar set of concrete walls and a locked door. Juvie again, he thinks. But he can't really remember what happened or how he got picked up. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. There were bats, bricks, chains. A knife. But he can't remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars.

Azael knows prison, 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 brawl, 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 there's more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. She's connected to him, and he needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.

***

The Knife and the Butterfly is definitely a different book than what I normally read. I’ll be totally honest – my favorite genres are what I read 99% of the time, and I don’t exactly branch out into the different or less popular very often. When the opportunity arose to read The Knife and the Butterfly, I jumped on the chance to, you know, broaden my horizons and read something completely different for me.

Well, my leap of faith outside of Tara world paid off. I had to think on it for a full day but finally came to the conclusion that I enjoyed the book. At first I wasn’t so sure, but then the more I thought about it (don’t you love it when a book makes you think), the more I realized that I was quite happy with the story. And here’s why.

This book centers around life inside a gang – violence, drugs, abuse, degrading women – and that is just not something I’m used to reading about in young adult literature. But, it’s still a real and sadly true world that exists, even though I have never personally experienced it myself. Make no mistake, The Knife and the Butterfly is gritty, hard, and definitely geared towards an older YA audience. But with all of that, I think it’s a book that needed to be written and definitely has its place within the young adult genre. I can see this book helping individuals who are either on a path towards gang life or for those who want to get out.

I give mad props to Ashley for writing this novel and can’t wait to read her other novel, What Can’t Wait, which was recently added to the ALA's 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults list.