‘When They Burned the Butterfly’ review: A flicker of greatness

There’s a version of When They Burned the Butterfly that is one of the better fantasy debuts of the last year. You can feel it in the bones of the thing — in the premise, which is quietly surprising; in the setting, which is one of the more evocative and politically alive choices any fantasy writer has made since the Green Bone Saga; in Adeline Siow herself, a protagonist sizzling with potential. That version of this novel exists. Wen-yi Lee has clearly imagined it. The question is whether it fully arrives on the page.

The answer, unfortunately, is: not entirely. But let’s start with what does work.

A city built on buried gods.

Singapore, 1972 — seven years into its independence. A city in the violent process of building itself from scratch. The back alleys still belong to the Kongzi, the old Chinese secret societies. Each one is a conduit for the gods that their immigrant ancestors brought with them from the mainland.

But magic here isn’t just a fantasy convenience. It’s the last thing the modern state hasn’t been able to legislate away, which makes it political by definition.

Red Butterfly is an all-women gang that channels a fire goddess. Three Steel’s ink tattoos become armor. White Bone manipulates their own bodies toward something approaching immortality. The government, meanwhile, is pushing the Act — an anti-secret-society operation designed to force the Kongzi into compliance or extinction — and has erected the Merlion over the harbor: a ten-meter tourist fabrication, a lion-fish chimera invented wholesale by the tourism board to give the new nation a sellable myth.

Lee uses that statue as one of the story’s central arguments. The Merlion is the city’s official story. Everything the Kongzi represents is what that story requires to be buried.

An unruly heroine worth the wait.

Into this walks Adeline. Catholic schoolgirl. Pyrokinetic. Deeply, constitutionally unwilling to behave. She finds out her mother was secretly the head of Red Butterfly and has died in a fire with a butterfly seared into her skin. And her version of grieving is to accelerate toward destruction—her own and everyone else’s, ideally both at once.

She is, to be fair and precise, a bitch. Not a girl boss. Definitely not a reluctant hero softened by her circumstances. She hurts people and relishes the rush. She goes out of her way to disrespect others, to make them suffer internally. And she chooses fire, over and over, because the choosing feels more real than anything the other life was offering her. It’s an extraordinarily specific characterization, and Lee commits to it with actual courage.

The problem is that the novel’s considerable ambitions are not always matched by the execution that would land them.

Brilliant in concept, uneven in scene.

Take the magic. Lee has constructed something genuinely interesting: fire that is slow, visible, expensive, that demands emotional fuel and leaves massive tactical exposure. It’s a magic system with real philosophical coherence, as it unpacks passion as a resource, destruction as visibility, and the goddess who demands to be felt and seen.

In summary, this is thrilling. On the page, less so. The moments where the magic should be dramatized most vividly — where readers should feel the heat, the tactical cost, the terror of being a woman who walks around as a lit fuse — tend to arrive briefly and then recede. The book tells us what fire means. It doesn’t always make us experience it.

This is, in fact, the novel’s central tension as a reading experience. It’s far better as a concept than as a scene. The postcolonial argument has spark — magic as suppressed history, the Kongzi as everything the Merlion’s clean narrative requires erasing — but the argument it makes never really goes anywhere satisfying or complete.

Where the spell breaks.

The found family of Red Butterfly is emotionally rich in theory but underdeveloped in practice, with most of the ensemble existing primarily as context for Adeline and Tian’s central relationship. Outside the queen bee leads, the characters feel like honeycombs.

The prose contributes to this unevenness in ways that are harder to dismiss. Lee has a knack for crafting beautiful lines, including a passage describing Adeline’s first sapphic awakening that rivals anything published in fantasy fiction this past year. But that craft sits alongside syntactic miscalibrations that break the rhythm at regular intervals.

The clunky construction, the word order that doesn’t quite cohere, the occasional line that communicates its meaning while arriving at it awkwardly… These aren’t catastrophic mistakes in isolation, but they accumulate, and they cost the novel something it can’t really afford to lose: the immersive spell that would make its slower first half feel like deliberate world-building rather than delay.

What still burns.

What survives all of this is considerable. The Pikman moment is as morally complex and devastating as anything in the book, and Lee handles it without sentimentality. The parallel between Tian’s personal coming-of-age and Singapore’s national one is structurally elegant and emotionally resonant.

The final act delivers on the book’s action promises with true force, too. And Adeline, even when the prose doesn’t fully support her, remains one of the most vivid and unapologetically difficult protagonists in recent fantasy.

The sequel, which Lee is already writing, is reportedly weirder and more claustrophobic. That sounds right. This is a writer who has imagined something extraordinary and is still finding her full way to it. She’ll probably get there. The fire’s already in her hands.

When They Burned the Butterfly is available now in hardcover, paperback, e-book, and audiobook formats.

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Images courtesy of Tor Books.