What Babochkin is keeping silent about

Babochkin and Stolyarov are ninth-graders who would be unlikely to interact if not for their teacher insisting on it. One is an athlete and a "good ol' boy," the other a quiet kid with quirks. Although it quickly becomes clear that these two aren't on opposite poles at all; they have a lot in common, and both are normal. This isn't about bullying, teasing, or one person pulling the other up to their level and drawing them into social life—it's about the fact that normalcy can take different forms. All the teenage characters in this book are well-adjusted; the school and classmates are not a hotbed of evil, but quite the opposite—you can feel much more comfortable among them than in your own home. And what is going on at home?..

There’s nothing particularly extraordinary there, no gritty darkness, just... a lack of love, like in an Andrey Zvyagintsev film. For many, family is far from a quiet harbor where one can draw strength.

This is a harsh, even at times radical novella:

While books about teenagers usually deal with disagreements with parents, in "Babochkin" these aren't just disagreements—the parents here are truly awful: a mentally unstable father and an indifferent, irritable mother. Every day they torment their son, humiliate him, tell him outright that it would be better if he didn't exist, that he isn't the way he should be; they blame him for everything and are never satisfied with anything. At the same time, on the surface, the family is perfectly normal, well-off, not some kind of social outcasts—no, they are very respectable monsters.

If books for teenagers as a rule end well (or at least not badly), here the ending is semi-open, and a happy ending is very much in doubt.

It’s unlikely anyone will shed tears over this book; it isn't scary or sentimental, but it raises relevant and multifaceted themes, the kind each of us has something to say about. Recommended for children aged 12-16.