The Butcher’s Daughter: The Book I Survived Because I Was Folding Woollens!

There are books you pick up because the title intrigues you. And then there are books you pick up because you are a fundamentally optimistic person who believes: “Surely this won’t be as bad as the last one.” (Also, it’s available for free in the Audible Plus catalogue, so how bad could it be?)

That confidence did not age well!

When you see a title like Butcher’s Daughter, you brace yourself for a certain amount of blood. A little gore. Perhaps the emotional equivalent of a tumble from a motorcycle. What I wasn’t prepared for was a front-row audio experience of animal slaughter so graphic that it instantly altered the tone of the book — and my relationship with it.

That scene appears in the very first chapter, which should have been reason enough to stop. To log out. Close the app. Remove my headphones and make better life choices. But I didn’t.

Part of the reason I didn’t stop is that I rarely give up on books once I’ve started. But there’s another reason too: I have a reading ritual, and I take it seriously. When I sit down with a physical book, I do it properly — soft lighting, a cosy corner, a warm drink, a small bubble of calm carved out of the day just for me. My mind settles, my shoulders drop, and I open the book with the quiet hope that it will meet me halfway.

Butcher’s Daughter was spared that kind of attention. Instead, it became background noise while I folded woollens, cleaned my room, and drove to meet friends — an attempt to dilute the gore with mild, harmless domesticity.

Had I offered it my full focus — that pre-sleep stillness, that intentional quiet — I would have needed professional help or a support group to recover from the experience. The audiobook worked only because half my brain was busy pairing socks.

Let’s talk about the plot. Or… whatever passed for a plot. And because I can’t be bothered to revisit it, here’s the synopsis from Goodreads

When Natalie Powers returns home for the first time in thirteen years, she must convince everyone she has fully recovered from the mental illness, which has seen her institutionalised for most of her young life.

But instead of being welcomed back, Natalie enters a baffling world of deception. She must fight her way through the lies in order to discover the truth about her mother’s sudden disappearance sixteen years earlier. To do this, Natalie must also try to make sense of the hazy memories from the past that continue to haunt her.

In the village of Little Downey, everybody appears to harbour a mysterious secret, including her father, Frank, the village butcher, who refuses to discuss the circumstances surrounding Natalie’s mother’s disappearance, but who can Natalie trust if not her own father? Especially when it becomes clear her protector and confidante, Dr Moses, is not all he appears.

Meanwhile, a spate of unexplained cliff-top suicides has seen the seaside resort go into decline. Are the villagers somehow involved or is something more sinister at work?

Determined to find out what happened to her mother, Natalie must make sure her own frailty and self-doubt does not catapult her back to the mental institution before she can uncover the truth…

Mental illness is one thing, but Natalie, our protagonist, has memory issues so severe, so frequent, and so narratively convenient that I began to wonder if the author was shaking me by the shoulders. One memory lapse? Interesting. Two? Suspenseful. Four? Convenient plot device? By the seventh or eighth time it happened, I simply accepted that coherence had left the building.

The story jumps timelines like it’s training for the Olympics. Everyone is suspicious. No one is normal. The whole village feels like it’s hiding something, and not in a clever, atmospheric way. More in a “we ran out of actual character motivations, so here, take a creepy uncle, take a creepy neighbour, take literally anyone behaving strangely” way.

Still, I hung on, and I was finally rewarded with a plot twist that stirred things up. The missing mother who was feared dead was actually alive? The strict, stern, reticent father who was being positioned as the bad guy was actually working in his daughter’s interest? Clichés, of course! It wasn’t a twist that was mind-blowingly original, but at this point, I was willing to take anything that resembled a coherent plot. Because for one brief moment, it felt as if the story might steady itself.

But like all toxic relationships, the moment you think, “Ah, maybe it’s turning around,” it pulls out something unforgivable. In this case, CANNIBALISM. Not subtle, hinted cannibalism. Not psychological-metaphorical cannibalism. But full-blown, town-wide, “everyone is apparently eating everyone” cannibalism.

And then the story makes its last grab for impact by turning the protagonist into a cannibal too. I paused the audiobook, not because I was startled, but because the line between psychological suspense and outright farce had finally collapsed.

At that point, it became clear what kind of book this was, and what it wasn’t. This is not psychological suspense. It isn’t a thriller. It isn’t even horror with intent or insight. It’s a story desperately trying to claw its way out of a horror movie prop box, tripping over its own plot and slipping on its own gore. Too many ideas are thrown in at once, none given the space to breathe, each dragging the other down.

By the time the final “twist you won’t see coming” arrived, I wasn’t shocked or horrified. I was simply tired. The particular kind of tired that makes you stop, sit very still, and quietly reassess how you ended up here.

So here’s what I’m taking away from this experience — my new, hard-earned reading philosophy: DNF at the first red flag. Because life is short. Time is finite. Patience is not renewable. And some stories are simply black holes engineered to swallow your sanity whole.

Besides, any book that requires active laundry as a coping mechanism has already failed the reader. I’ve folded the woollens. I’m done with the book.