Death and the Butterfly

Hester’s tragic tale (after Diamond Sutra) uses delicate vignettes to connect a story of loss in WWII with a journalist turned paperboy in the 1980s and a gun-shy groom in 2001. In England, Susan McEwan, 13, loses her RAF pilot brother, Philip, and chief air raid warden father, Charles, during the first years of WWII. Alexander Polo becomes a 31-year-old paperboy in early 1980s Toronto when no other work is available to support his family. In 2001 Montana, Jack Riordan flees from the altar before his wedding to Bea Sims, and hides out in the used RV he bought Bea as a wedding gift. There, he finds Polo’s article about Susan’s death stashed in the console. Jack anonymously sends the article and some Neruda poems to Polo, which inspires Polo’s first successful efforts at poetry, leading him to move on from a series of personal elegies for his daughter, Shoshanna, lost to crib death, in favor of more abstract musings. Jack and Bea eventually marry, and later, Polo’s poems console Jack after Bea is stricken with cancer (“I love you like violins love windows/that open onto orchards and pear blossoms”). Neither sinking to the maudlin nor trite, Hester writes with a grace that uplifts these myriad lives. This gift to readers shows how beauty and death can coexist. (July)