Butterfly Games: A Novel

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Robert Avila

There is a particular kind of historical fiction that uses the past as costume and nothing more, pretty settings wrapped around thin characters making predictable choices. And then there is the kind that makes you feel the specific danger of being a woman in a world where every social interaction is a negotiation you cannot afford to lose. Butterfly Games belongs firmly to the second kind, and the fact that it is a debut makes it all the more remarkable.

Reading it feels genuinely immersive in a way that snaps into place early and doesn't release. Kelly Scarborough spent years visiting Swedish castles and digging through archives, and that depth of research creates something that no amount of stylistic polish can fake: the sensation of a world that existed before the book did, that would have kept existing whether anyone wrote about it or not. Jacquette moves through that world with the particular alertness of someone who has learned from childhood that carelessness has consequences, and that vigilance becomes the reader's own.

What Scarborough is really writing about sits beneath the forbidden romance and the glittering court intrigue. This is a book about the cost of being exceptional in a system designed to contain you, about what a woman must sacrifice to protect the things she loves most, and about how easily the same qualities that make someone dangerous to power can be turned against her. Those themes travel across centuries without losing a single degree of heat.

Her prose has a near-cinematic quality that pulls you through scenes without ever making the movement feel rushed. The Stockholm ballrooms and Swedish manor houses are rendered with enough specificity to feel tactile, and the political tensions surrounding the Bernadotte dynasty give the love story real stakes beyond the personal.

For readers who want their historical fiction to have genuine emotional weight alongside its drama, this book delivers both with the confidence of someone who has been telling this particular story in her head for a very long time.

About the Author 

Kelly Scarborough

After more than two decades as an attorney, I wrote my debut novel, a tragic love story about two star-crossed lovers, a countess and a prince. It’s based on real-life characters who lived in Sweden, and is perfect for fans of Philippa Gregory, Outlander, and Bridgerton. I live on the Connecticut Shoreline and in South Carolina's Lowcountry, where I bang away on my MacBook Pro whenever my Shih Tzu cooperates. At heart, I'll always be a Jersey Girl.