A Review of When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee

This title will be published on October 21, 2025 by Tor Books.

*SPOILER ALERT* This review contains plot details of When They Burned the Butterfly.

Adeline Siow has a secret: she can summon fire to her fingertip with nothing but a thought, just like her mother. Aside from their fire, they couldn’t be more different. She just didn’t realize how different until she returns home after sneaking out to find their house burning and her mother murdered. The only clue Adeline discovers is a butterfly seared onto her mother’s skin—the same one she saw tattooed on a mysterious girl with fire hours before at a shady bar in Singapore’s redlight district. Adeline’s quest for answers leads her into 1970s Singapore’s criminal underworld, where she encounters magically tattooed gangsters who are the final conduits of their ancestors’ gods. Even more surprising, Adeline’s mother was one of them! She lived a secret life as Madam Butterfly, leader of the infamous Red Butterfly gang—a group of women with fire like Adeline’s. Throughout her dynamic foray into adult fantasy, author Wen-ye Lee’s upcoming novel When They Burned the Butterfly throws readers headfirst into a fiery story of rage, vengeance, and what those emotions can turn us into.

One of the novel’s stand-out elements is the relationship Lee develops between Adeline and Tian, one of the Red Butterflies. Watching Adeline slowly discover how to let another person in is simultaneously rewarding and heartbreaking. She makes a lot of mistakes in the early stages of her friendship and eventual romance with Tian—for example, her instincts are to self-isolate rather than talk conflict out, which leads to difficulty in communicating her feelings—and while it can be frustrating to see her make those mistakes, they lend a level of authenticity to the relationship. Adeline is discovering genuine connection for the first time in her life—of course it isn’t going to be perfect.The reader notices the relationship with Tian developing into something deeper long before Adeline does. She is startled to notice how much she cares for Tian and is delightfully blunt about it in the moment: “Adeline’s heart was pounding again, something bone-deep reaching through her for a second time that day. A realization of herself was starting to form, and with it the world finally falling into place, but it was falling slowly, the exact shape of it still just beyond reach. She stepped forward to it, unconsciously, and when Tian winced this time, she went closer with full understanding of her own desires.” Lee doesn’t shy away from this nuance, which makes Adeline’s personal growth and the growth of her relationship with Tian that much more exciting.

Another strength of When They Burned the Butterfly is its exploration of rage. Anger hangs over Adeline for most of the novel, but her acknowledgement and understanding of it evolves with her character. For much of the story, her rage about her mother’s death, her isolation, and the seemingly insurmountable number of threats facing the remaining Red Butterflies is largely blind; she wields it clumsily and lashes out to regain some control. When she encounters something that scares her, like an emotion she doesn’t know how to process or threats made against her new friends, she responds by looking for a fight she can handle. Throughout the novel, Lee builds a subtle tension; each time Adeline gets closer to avenging her mother or protecting the Red Butterflies from a new threat, something worse happens and there’s nothing she can do about it. When she finally confronts the man responsible for many of the terrible things she and her friends have endured is one of the most powerful scenes in the novel: “All that hurt, all those bodies, and behind it was just a man on the floor who wasn’t even armed and didn’t even fight?” All of Adeline’s anger—at those who betrayed her, at herself, at her own fear—has finally found someone to focus on and explodes in this ultimate, climactic confrontation. Readers will rage alongside Adeline as she sets a fire unlike any she’s set before.

While this overarching theme of rage and the relationship between Adeline and Tian were exceptionally well-developed, I found the initial world-building somewhat lacking. By the end of the novel, readers are immersed in Singapore’s magical criminal underworld alongside Adeline, but in the beginning that immersion is not achieved. A lot of vague information about the magic system is presented to the reader at the start of the story, which is overwhelming and makes it difficult to follow. Readers gain a lot more context in the middle of the novel, but introducing the magic system gradually could have given readers time to process the information and helped the pacing of the first third of the story. The pacing and the worldbuilding in general are handled much better in the final two-thirds of the novel.

Overall, When They Burned the Butterfly is an intriguing foray into adult fantasy from author Wen-yi Lee. Lee handles the marriage between fantastical and historical elements well, making this novel especially appealing to lovers of historical and speculative fiction. The blend of real world and fantastical elements also makes this book a great place to start for anyone diving into the fantasy genre for the first time.