The Patron Saint of Butterflies. By Cecilia Galante

Galante, Cecilia. The Patron Saint of Butterflies.
Bloomsbury (St. Martins), 2008, 292p, $16.99, 978-1-59990-249-4.

When her grandmother takes fourteen-year-old Agnes, her younger brother, and best friend Honey and escapes Mount Blessing, a Connecticut religious commune, Agnes clings to the faith she loves while Honey looks toward a future free of control, cruelty, and preferential treatment.
Honey and Agnes, both twelve years old, live in the religious commune of Mount Blessing. Her mother who left the commune abandoned honey as an infant. The commune is under the control of Emmanuel, an authoritarian leader with a penchant for corporal punishment who requires total obedience from his followers. Honey and Agnes have been close friends from birth but their paths begin to diverge, putting their friendship in jeopardy. Agnes is intent on becoming a saint and practices acts of mortification in order to be perfect and holy, as Emmanuel demands; Honey, a frequent visitor to the Regulation Room for retraining, sees Mount Blessing as a cult from which she longs to escape. Honey’s opportunity for freedom comes when Agnes’s grandmother, Nana Pete, arrives unexpectedly for a visit and discovers that the children are being physically abused. She unsuccessfully tries to reason with her son, who is Agnes’s father. Nana Pete’s concern for Agnes, her younger brother Benny and Honey, causes her to kidnap the children. Nana Pete and the children head south and during the road trip Honey fights for the Agnes that she knew while Agnes resists turning away from the path Emmanuel expects of her. When Nana Pete dies of a heart attack, Agnes seizes the opportunity to phone her father, asking him to bring her and Benny back to the commune but she realizes too late the mistake she has made. At the same time, she realizes that “the God [she] wants to stand up for is not the one Emmanuel represents” and for the first time, she courageously thinks for herself. Narrated by Honey and Agnes in alternating chapters, readers will gain insight into how a cult exerts control over its members. Even the font type, which varies according to the chapter. Is representative of the girls’ personalities and emotions. The characters in this tightly written story are well developed and have depth and the plot will hold the attention of readers until the last chapter.
Recommended for library collections with religious themes. RZ