Trigger warning for rape and physical abuse.
Praise Song of the Butterflies, by Bernice L. McFadden, was inspired by the practice of turning girls into trokosi, slaves who are supposed to atone for their families’ sins or change their families’ luck by suffering unimaginable abuse for the length of their lives. The book captures their plight, but I thought that the characterization and setting suffered from the book’s brevity.
Abeo Kata, we learn in a short prologue, is doing alright in New York in the early twenty-first century—at least until she pulls a screwdriver out of her purse and brutally attacks a man she calls the Evil One. The narrative whisks us back to the mid-1970s, to a fictional country neighboring Ghana. Abeo lives a charmed life with her former model mother and father who works in the Ministry of Finance. When her grandfather dies and her paternal grandmother comes to live when them, it all starts to go wrong. Her younger brother gets sick and the grandmother doses him with traditional medicine. Then Abeo’s father, Wasik, falls under investigation for embezzlement. The grandmother, a grim woman with a lot of power over her son, tells Wasik that the only way to change the family’s fortune is to turn Abeo into a trokosi. Trokosi are slaves who are ostensibly laboring for the gods but are, in practice, slaves to be brutalized by the people who run the system.
Wasik is a weak man who barely pauses before putting Abeo in a car and abandoning her at a shrine. Her young age does not spare her from the appalling physical, and soon sexual, abuse from the priest and his son. The plot breezes along until the practice is banned in 1998. Unfortunately for Abeo, this comes too late to rescue her from decades of abuse. Some readers might be thankful that the book doesn’t wallow in Abeo’s slavery; I was. The end of Praise Song for the Butterflies brings us back around to where the book opened.
The largest problem for me with Praise Song for the Butterflies (apart from the fact that the title didn’t make sense to me, which always bothers me) is that it’s too short. I wanted to know more about the characters and their motivations. I never really understood where Wasik’s weakness comes from or why Abeo’s aunt Serafine was so brittle. We never get inside any of the characters’ heads. I always believed that the benefit of issue books, which this novel very much is, is that it allows us to walk a mile in another’s shoes. We’re shown instead of told why something is awful and should be changed. I think Praise Song for the Butterflies would have been more successful in its mission—and as a novel—if it took its time building up the characters.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss, for review consideration. It will be released 28 August 2018.