Book Blog #1: Discovering the Butterfly Boy

I am reading Butterfly Boy by Rigoberto Gonzalez. The book seemed very interesting even before I started reading. This was because of things like the cover, the reviews and the epigram.

When choosing the book, I was really won over by the cover. It is dark with an obfuscated picture of a boy with butterfly wings on his back. His eyes are a surprisingly bright yellow. This contrast startled me at first, but then I actually started looking at the picture. Why does this boy have on a smock and wings? Why does he look so hurt?

The reviews are full of approbation. "Deeply felt," and "engrossing" (Manrique, Reviews), were just some of the words used to describe the work. Then I see it in Silvia Spitta's review as she raves about Gonzalez' "poignant autobiography": "[his] outing as a gay man." Yes! This is definitely going to be good.

I'm itching to get to the 1st page when I stumble upon the epigram. " 'Of curse I love my father' a typo in an email," it reads. I feel it showed that Gonzalez is going to have problems with his father in the book. This book is getting more and more toothsome by the minute (and I haven't even started reading it yet!)

The table of contents is a combination of 5 parts, with more modicum chapters with the names of places and dates. The dates are not in chronological order, and I'm not too fond of books like that; however, the book seems so good that I have to just read the first page to see if this is what I want to read for class.

It doesn't disappoint. Within the first 10 pages, I found out that Gonzalez is in an abusive relationship with an older gentleman. He decides to go visit family to get away from him. I can't really tell if his family knows about his sexual orientation or not, but I don't think they do. From the way he describes his family, they don't seem that accepting of different things, so I doubt if he has told them yet.

Overall, I am really glad I chose Butterfly Boy so far. The book is interesting and I feel like it is going to be very dramatic and deep. Just think about it, if it didn't have the cover it did, I might not be reading it right now. I know people say not to judge a book by its cover, but in this case, it wasn't a bad thing.