Black ButterFly

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I felt disconnected from the characters - they weren't well-fleshed out and I didn't feel like I really knew them. While things are difficult and there are small obstacles she must face, Zora begins to enjoy the solitude and the chance it gives her to engage in her painting.

Morris gets us to experience every little emotion with Zora—the shock, the hurt, the cold, the hunger, also the few moments of comfort or happiness snatched amidst it all.I was interested in the subject matter but this feels superficial in treatment and with no subtlety or nuance or additional historical insight, or any sense of knowledge beyond that which anyone outside of the former Yugoslavia could have read in the newspapers. As we confront the role that race and space play in shaping our cities, people, and health, The Black Butterfly provides the grounding and better understanding needed to repair and reinvent our communities.

He describes forces like neglect, disrespect, gentrification, redlining, subprime lending, hypersegregation, and hyperpolicing. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma is at the root of crises and violence in hypersegregated cities around the country. This is only my second book of his and I plan to seek out ALL others by Drake but I’ve gathered that I’m 100% right in that he’s a hopeless romantic. Born to a Bosnian mother and a Cornish father, I grew up mostly in London, spending childhood summers in my mother's hometown of Sarajevo.All I can say is, if you are looking for a book that unveils the hidden costs of war on the citizens forced into it, and that juxtaposes many opposite feelings - vulnerability and resilience, hope and hopelessness, devastation and creation, this is the book for you. For Zora, being deprived of her ability to make art is almost as bad; being an artist is part of her very identity.

The reader understands that Sarajevo is a city in which people of many nationalities and religions live in relative harmony. This was a wonderful though heart-breaking book which kept me reading all through, and one which I highly recommend. She knows all its alleys and courtyards, all its scents and sounds—the way the light falls at the end of their street in wintertime, the rattle of the tram, the blowsy roses that bloom each June in the mosque gardens, the plums and fogs in the autumn, the ponderous old men playing chess in the cafés, the mahalas—the old neighbourhoods—that radiate from the centre like the spiral of a snail’s shell. From there, he travels to Kingston, Jamaica, where he meets the chief culprit behind his misadventures – the progeny of an old enemy, Cassivelaunus Fetch Junior, who is using a "New Scout Movement" to mask his mass poisoning schemes. This book is absolutely a must read for anyone in public policy/elected office, but also incredibly thorough in understanding the segregation and continued disivestment in Black neighborhoods.

I would have appreciated a brief note at the end on the facts behind the cause of the war and the political climate at the time, just like the facts behind the ethnic groups were clarified in the author’s note. I would have thought it to be an exaggeration but when I read that part, I remembered a scene from the first episode of the TV series ‘Chernobyl” where a similar experience with “black butterflies” was shown.

Set in 1992 Sarajevo, Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris is a harrowing (fictional) account of the first year of the Siege as seen from the perspective of fifty- five year old painter and Professor of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts , Zora Kočović, a civilian trapped in the war-torn city that has always been her home. In the spring of 1992, fifty-five year old Zora can’t imagine that the Siege of Sarajevo will last long. BLACK BUTTERFLIES was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023, the RSL Ondaatje Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize and the Nota Bene Prize. This book is a collection of memories and experiences Drake lived after the death of one of his brothers.

This was a challenging read (and suffered from being a book I owned and therefor was not under a library due date to finish).