When They Burned the Butterfly
Wen-Yi Lee
Hardcover / eBook
ISBN: 9781250369451
Tor, October 2025, 480 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month we’re traveling back in time to the birth of an island nation on the verge of creating itself in a clash of old gods and new ideas, a tumultuous struggle for love and self in a world of hard choices and harder truths, and the fire that burns beneath the skin of all those wronged by pain, loss, and grief—that’s right, it’s When They Burned the Butterfly, by Wen-Yi Lee.

When They Burned the Butterfly takes place in 1970s Singapore, in the midst of the turmoil of the island nation’s reinvention of itself, and it follows the life of Adeline Siow, a bored sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who feels like she doesn’t quite fit in with her mother’s plans for her future. Adeline has a gift: the ability to manifest fire. One she shares with her mother, but rather than encourage her, Adeline’s mother seems to do everything in her power to hide their abilities—preferring instead to focus on running a successful clothing shop, leaving Adeline feeling unmoored and adrift.

That’s where my recap of the plot is going to end, because very quickly Things Happen, and then all of a sudden it’s magic battles here, gangsters there, forbidden love, and emotional drama popping up like a persistent gopher, and through it all, Adeline burns away piece after piece of what she thought was her life in order to find her true self, but all fires need fuel, and sometimes the cost of that fuel is high.

The thing that first struck me about When They Burned the Butterfly was Wen-Yi Lee’s haunting and evocative prose (which, unlike my own, if you’re a regular reader of this column, does not trend towards run-on sentences). The writing in this book is both sparse, yet richly laden with meaning. There were multiple times where I read a section and had to pause for a moment just to wrap my head around the multitude of ideas that casually unfurled like a flower bud opening up. Wen-Yi Lee does an amazing job transporting the reader back to Singapore’s birth as a modern nation (with all the chaos and change that implies), while at the same time building a world so rich and lived-in that it was easy for me to imagine myself walking down the streets of something old giving way to something new, nearly bursting at the seams as it does so. The trick of giving a reader an all-access pass to multiple characters’ inner thoughts while still keeping everything feeling zoomed in tight and personal is not an easy one to pull off, but Wen-Yi Lee makes it look almost too easy (and no, I’m not jealous as a writer, you’re jealous).

The second thing I really liked about When They Burned the Butterfly is how much emotion and feeling waits within its pages, ready to burst out when the reader least expects it. Adeline’s journey, and the people she meets, is a rollercoaster of ups and downs, of love found and lost, of grief and revenge and hope and despair, and her transformation from who she was at the start of the book to who she becomes felt earned every step of the way. I do have to warn you that the book does have some intense scenes of violence and loss, though none felt cheap or there for shock value, but When They Burned the Butterfly is not afraid to punch you in the mouth with a reminder that human beings can be extremely vicious creatures to one another. However, Wen-Yi Lee is also quick to remind us that that same capacity for violence is also capable of endless love, of forging bonds of family with people who had been strangers just the day before, and that all of us are more complex than who we appear to be at first glance.

The last thing I want to point out is that When They Burned the Butterfly is also one hell of an action-adventure that will not leave you wanting for adrenaline-filled moments. This is a book filled with old magic and older gods, jealous entities who demand their powers be used, and magic in the hands of gangsters struggling to find their niche in a new world. It is a potent combination indeed. The powers of the various forces involved feel suitably baroque and otherworldly, but always in a way that is tightly knit to community and the foundations of what came before. Magic is an accepted fact of life in Adeline’s Singapore. A reminder of the disparate backgrounds of everyone brought together to forge a new nation out of jungle, sea, flesh, and bone. It’s something that lends itself perfectly to the business of grief and revenge. Oaths are made and broken, because not even the gods are immune to a time of change.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book on multiple levels. The writing is exquisite, the pacing is near perfect, and the slow burn of Adeline’s discovery of herself, as well as the uncovering of the various mysteries surrounding her mother lead to the nearly impossible task of trying to put the book down instead of reading one more chapter. It’s clear that When They Burned the Butterfly is both a love letter to Wen-Yi Lee’s home country, as well as an indictment of its flaws, but many of the truths revealed in its pages are universal in scope and can appeal to readers anywhere. If you’re looking for something fantastical in scope, yet gritty in execution, you’re not going to go wrong picking this one up.