I feel churlish for reconsidering my ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review and knocking off two stars, but in reflecting on the experience of reading the book, it occurs to me that I really was never intellectually grabbed by anything in the writing. The story was distressing and had the strong ring of truth and authenticity, although it was not ostensibly based on any single life during the siege of Sarajevo.

When reading other fiction I find myself pausing to let the author’s ideas sink in. It’s a kind of philosophical experience; the action is set aside in order to ponder on life’s meaning. This was the case in “Demon Copperhead”, in the stories of Nada Alic’s collection, and in “Cursed Bread”, but didn’t really happen in “Black Butterflies”. Action, plot, description, internal monologue, yes. But not a lot of penetrating insight.

On a production note… it seems as though there was a pagination confusion, and the inside and outside margins were flopped, so that you had wide inner margins an narrow outer margins. And while I love the types of Frederic Goudy, I don’t think it was the right call here. I would have looked at something Slavic and more contemporary. (Or at the very least European and from the era, like Scala, which you couldn’t escape at the time.) Goudy was American and iconoclastic, but he died in 1947…