The Butterfly Tattoo

The Butterfly Tattoo (previously called The White Mercedes) was Philip Pullman's first novel, directed at the teen market.

The story, set in Oxford like Pullman's famous trilogy, His Dark Materials, is pacy, with well drawn and interesting characters.

All the same, I found it truncated, rushing too

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quickly and abruptly to a conclusion. Perhaps the unpublished novelist, or his editor, was too anxious to keep it short and crisp. All the same, a few more twists in the plot, with more variation of pace and an extra 100 pages or so, could have transformed this from a good novel to a memorable one.

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Through the eyes of late teenage Chris we fall in love with a mysterious experienced and wounded Jenny. Until recently his world was whole and he protected within the walls of a traditional familyhome, but recently he is all alone in chaos since the separation between his parents. Jenny becomes his

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fix point, and she needs him as well. But life has decided to show more of its dark sides while at it.

Innocence's painful and necessary path to growing up? An argument for the fallenness of the world? A greek drama destined for destruction or a rebirth coming from tearing the old system down? A easily read book for both young and old people to recognize themselves in.

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Read this one ages ago and can't remember much about it other than I enjoyed it.

“Chris Marshal met the girl he was going to kill on a warm night in early June.” So begins The White Mercedes as its intricate clockwork of minor lies, coincidences, and events propelled from the tangled pre-histories of the protagonists gets set in motion a thrilling story that culminates in

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the girl, Jenny’s, death. Much of the novel more of a young adult, coming of age love story about a seventeen year old boy who meets a slightly older girl. But when they go and see Romeo and Juliet together the parallels are only too clear and a darker hue falls over the story. One of Pullman’s earlier novels, as standalone work with no elements of the historical novel or fantasy, it is well told, well plotted, and very much worth reading.

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My first non-Dark Materials Pullman book, which is supposedly going to be made into an indie movie at some point. Originally titled 'The Butterfly Tattoo', this young adult novel is a quick read if a bit predictable. And, randomly enough, the theme of good/evil vs knowledge/innocence that we saw in

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Dark Materials rears its head sort of out of the blue at the very end.

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I just couldn't get into this book. I found the plot slow and the characters uninspiring.