Spoiler Alerts: Don’t read further if you plan to read The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree.

My book club was reading a book called The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree by India Hayford. Hayford is a good writer and it was an engaging enough story but John Calvin, the villain, irritated me. He might as well been twirling his mustache every time he appears in the book just so you remembered he was the bad guy. He was just evil. Bad to the bone, a bully that nobody likes but everyone kowtows too. It also makes the more dubious actions of the heroes a lot easier to stomach. You can do anything to stop evil after all, right?

That is precisely the problem though. It drains the story of any moral ambiguity. Should she or shouldn’t she isn’t the question.We are rooting for Genevieve, the heroine, to do whatever she has to do to stop the dastardly John Calvin. The reader gives her the license to kill because they hate her nemesis. But shouldn’t murder give one pause. Is this the only way the villain can be stopped?

I think in this case, maybe another method could have worked. When your whole family hates you and you are raping your own daughters, I would think revealing the monster might have worked just as well. But no, John Calvin is too evil. He deserves death. Oddly enough, Hayford pulls her punch at the end because Genevieve isn’t the one to exact revenge on John Calvin, it is another character which may give the book a bit more mystery but, again, it is distracting. The book’s lead character is Genevieve. Her trials and tribulations are the main focus. The reader knows the most about her life and her motivations — yet she turns over the satisfaction of killing John Calvin to someone else.

So, even though John Calvin is evil and deserves to die, Genevieve is too good to kill him. So all of Genevieve’s rather sparse moral dilemma about killing John Calvin is for naught as she ultimately doesn’t have to pull the trigger or, in this case, release the snakes. It is strangely unsatisfying and disappointing ending for a readable and page turning book.