The Butterfly Garden

Samira Grantaire, The Butterfly Garden’s 18-year-old protagonist, has grappled with several disparate identities throughout her troubled life. At age 14, running away from the home of her recently deceased guardian (a grandmother with mental health conditions), Samira uses money stolen from her grandmother to acquire a forged ID in the name of Inara Morrissey, which also raises her age to 19 so she can live independently in New York City. After supporting herself with restaurant work for about two years and earning her GED, Inara falls victim to the Gardener, a serial kidnapper/murderer, who rechristens her Maya and adds her to his harem of captive Butterflies. Imprisoned in the Garden with more than 20 other girls, Inara uses her resilience and compassion to help and protect the Gardener’s other captives, while searching for some means of escape. Eventually, she is instrumental in the arrest of the Gardener and the rescue of his surviving victims. In The Butterfly Garden, Inara is the first-person narrator of most of the novel’s events, which unfold through her interrogations by the FBI.

Painfully aware, at a very young age, of being unloved and unwanted by her narcissistic, hedonistic parents, Inara loses the ability to cry after being abandoned by her parents at a carnival at the age of six.