Bonnie
A Novel
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“Absorbing...poignant, often heartbreaking...Schwarz is a vivid storyteller.” –The New York Times Book Review
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drowning Ruth vividly evokes the perennially fascinating true crime love affair of Bonnie and Clyde in this suspenseful, gorgeously detailed fictional portrait of Bonnie Parker, one of America’s most enigmatic women.
Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. She dreamed of being a movie star or a singer or a poet. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death.
Infusing the psychological acuity of literary fiction with the relentless pacing of a thriller, Bonnie follows Bonnie from her bright, promising youth to her final month of shoot-outs, kidnappings, and desperate car chases through America’s hinterland in the grip of the Great Depression, as the noose of the law tightened around her. Enriched by Christina Schwarz’s extensive research in the footsteps of Bonnie and Clyde and written with her powerful sense of place and time, Bonnie is a plaintive and page-turning account of a woman destroyed by a lethal combination of longing and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schwarz (The Edge of the Earth) entices with this introspective view of notorious bank robber Bonnie Parker. In 1926, Bonnie marries her high school sweetheart, Roy, at 15 and they drop out of school. After Roy disappears for long stretches, Bonnie begins waitressing at Marco's Caf in Dallas to make ends meet, writing poetry on the side and leaving out food for people in need. After the Great Depression hits and Marco's closes, Bonnie works odd jobs and her dreams of becoming a poet dim ("she'd learned to accept the fading of those bright dreams as the price of adulthood"). In 1930, Bonnie leaves Roy and stays at a friend's house. A young man named Clyde Barrow shows up there, and Bonnie becomes enamored with him. Clyde courts Bonnie for a few weeks before being slapped with a two-year sentence for stealing a safe. Bonnie visits him in prison, and after he's freed and starts robbing banks, she evolves from accomplice to partner in crime. She and Clyde continue their spree across the southeast, stealing cars, robbing banks, and exchanging gunfire with police, activities that lead to their being gunned down in a police ambush in 1934. The author expertly magnifies the characters' desperation and intertwines the excitement of eluding the law with their magnetic sexual attraction. Schwarz's rich narrative brings fresh life into the notorious tale of two American outlaws.
