Today is the last day of our readalong for The Butterfly Assassin, two and a half months after we started. It’s been my longest blog series, with well over sixty thousand words in posts – not quite as many words as another volume in the trilogy (they tend to run in the 95-100k range), but certainly an additional short book. So if you’re feeling like you’ve read an entire book’s worth of posts, that’s because you have. And if I’m feeling like I’ve written one, well, ditto.

Today is the fifth of December, the day of Emma’s funeral.

A lot of the elements of this scene have been present for a long time – we’ve always had some kind of funeral for Emma at the end of the book, Isabel’s always had a bit of an angsty little speech / internal monologue about what Emma meant to her (though in some previous versions she said more of it out loud), and, crucially, Isabel has always taken revenge and killed Michael.

A lot of details have changed, however. Emma’s funeral used to be the penultimate chapter of the book, while the revenge scene was a chapter of its own, at the very end, with a considerable time skip between them – all the way to the following spring, in the first five drafts. As a result, there was no need for that scene to serve as the final confirmation of Isabel’s return to Comma, because she was already firmly ensconced within the guild – which meant there was no appearance from Ronan at the very end. Instead, we closed on the act of vengeance, of Isabel looking down at Michael’s body… honestly, it had big Aeneid energies, not least because it felt somewhat unfinished.

But before the moment of revenge, we had a bridging scene – a happier moment. In the existing book, Emma inspires Isabel to dye her hair bright colours, in imitation of her mural, but she doesn’t directly engineer it. But originally, it was her idea in a more direct way. From the fifth draft:

Bit of unsubtle pathetic fallacy there, if we take the winter as a metaphor for grief and healing, but hey.

But now there’s only a week between these events, and we don’t see Isabel’s decision to dye her hair – only the results of it. I gave Isabel blue hair with one side shaved because, at eighteen, I desperately wanted this for myself and was far too shy to actually do it, but anyone who’s seen pictures of me aged nineteen or twenty will know that eventually I did shave one side and dye the rest a variety of colours (with blue being my favourite). They might imagine I gave Isabel my own characteristics as a kind of self-insert, but it was actually the opposite – she had it first.

One of the other big differences with the early versions of the final scene is that Michael’s mother, Angela, was present for many of them, and Isabel’s revenge was against them both. Obviously, Angela is no longer involved in the events of the book, and has actually been dead for quite a long time before it starts. Including her grave in this scene was sort of a nod to her earlier presence at this point of the book, but it’s also a way to explain Michael’s actions – his lack of resistance, his general despair. We know that he was traumatised by Angela’s death, and that Judith capitalised on this as a way to manipulate him; now, having lost any hope of safety in the arms of the Ryans’, he’s got no one left in the city to turn to, and no guild to take him in.

Unlike Isabel.

Ronan’s presence in the final scene is an innovation of the sixth draft, and since then has always taken more or less the same form that it takes in the finished book. It’s an ending that tells us the story isn’t over yet – that Isabel’s time with Comma has only just begun, and that she hasn’t succeeded at escaping the guild, despite her best efforts. We’ve also successfully isolated Isabel: she’s left Leo and Mortimer inside at the funeral, she’s killed Michael (her double, her almost-brother), and she’s kneeling beside Emma’s grave. The reliable catharsis of violence has failed her; revenge has proved unsatisfying, and now that it’s done, there’s nothing left to hope for in terms of closure. Nobody is here for her in this moment, except Ronan.

And Ronan isn’t there to comfort her. Just to use her.

Some readers (those who didn’t realise the book was the first in a trilogy, for the most part) have found it too abrupt, too open-ended, and with The Hummingbird Killer ending even more suddenly, with a cliffhanger, I’ve felt significant pressure when working on book three to make sure the ending feels solid and everything important is wrapped up, with just enough ambiguity to leave doors open for the imagination to work.

I’ll be the first to admit that as an author, I struggle with endings. I’m not a planner, so I don’t often know exactly where I’m going until I get there. The Butterfly Assassin is one of the rare exceptions to that, actually, because I knew the approximate plot of book two and even some of book three right from the start, so I knew where I needed to get us in the end… I just also knew that wasn’t an end, yet.

It’s difficult as a debut author, though, because you can’t rely on selling the whole trilogy, and you need to make sure the first book can stand on its own. Which I tried to do (reviewers are torn on whether they think I succeeded!): I tried to give Isabel a coherent character arc, even though it isn’t a character arc that’s finished, and I tried to make sure she either failed or succeeded at her various goals (escaping her parents, success; escaping the guild, fail) rather than leaving them incomplete. I’ve read some deeply unsatisfying first instalments of series where none of the character’s goals or development were wrapped up in the first book, and that always makes me feel like they only gave me half the book.

So, I wanted to get Isabel to a place that felt narratively satisfying, while also being sure that we were all set up for book two. But not a cliffhanger, because people don’t tend to love those from authors they don’t yet trust to pick things up again in a satisfying way. I was prepared to either sell just the first book, or the whole trilogy.

What actually happened was that I sold two books. The Butterfly Assassin and The Hummingbird Killer. And that was… honestly, possibly the worst case scenario on a story level, though better from my point of view than selling one. The ending of The Butterfly Assassin would be an unsatisfying place to end Isabel’s story, and a rather sad one, but it would work. The end of The Hummingbird Killer, though… well, it would make me look like an edgelord trying to make everyone miserable, for starters, but it also leaves Isabel in a far more precarious, transitional position, and would be much less narratively satisfying. Book two is where I break everything – book three is where I intended to fix it.

Fortunately, we did, in the end, sell book three as well, and I got the chance to fix the things I broke – well, those that can be fixed. But those who are lost are still lost, and not coming back. Some people told me that until the funeral scene, they really thought I was going to find a way for Emma not to actually be dead, but I have to say, I find that deeply irritating in books when I’ve already mourned for a character and invested emotions in their loss, so I don’t tend to pull that kind of fake-out.  

I do like to give characters time to process their grief, though. I think it’s an essential part of making the deaths hit for readers, but I also think it’s part of the process by which tragedy becomes comforting – catharsis rather than angst, comfort rather than harm. I like tragedies to feel healing, not because nothing bad happens but because terrible things happen and life goes on.

Life goes on. And keeps going on. Even when it’s unbearable, even when we don’t want it to, even when it feels catastrophically rude that it should do so. How dare it go on? But it does. And we endure. And grief doesn’t necessarily go away, but it becomes easier to carry.

Isabel isn’t ready to carry it yet; she’s hardly ready to pick it up in the first place. But allowing her to acknowledge that it’s there is the first step towards that. It’s not revenge that will bring her peace, in the end. It’s time, and the chance to heal.

She’ll get the former, but the latter will be largely out of her reach – at least for a little while. But we’ll get there in the end.

Just as we have come to the end of this readalong. (Although I could, if I were desperate, write a whole post about the author’s note, or the epigraph, or the dedication…)

It’s been a commitment. I won’t lie, I don’t think I anticipated writing 2/3rds of another novel when I started this readalong back in September. It’s achieved my goal of encouraging some comments on my blog, after all these years of silence, though it still hasn’t quite prompted the lively comment section discussions I might have hoped for. To those who have stuck around and shared their thoughts, though, I am immensely grateful to you.

If you’ve enjoyed this series: you’re welcome, I will probably never do this again, thanks for reading. If you’ve been waiting eagerly for it to be over: I’m amazed you’re reading this, also I’m sorry, it’s over now. And if you have finished The Butterfly Assassin (recently or longer ago), please consider leaving a review on Amazon/Goodreads/Waterstones/wherever else you can find to leave a review. They really do help with visibility, and I would be extremely grateful.

But for now: tell me your thoughts on this chapter, on this ending, on this whole book, on the readalong as a format, any and all comments you may have. It’s not your last chance to comment on my blog (you’re extremely welcome to comment on my non-readalong posts in future), but it’s your last chance to comment on this readalong, so I hope to see lots of you in the comment selection below.

Much love <3