Welcome to the website bonnieleeblack.com. For news, views, reviews and interviews worth factoring into your life, please click on the white box to the left to see what Bonnie's award-winning blog, The WOW Factor, is all about.
About Bonnie's books ...
THE OTHER SIDE
Bonnie Lee Black's newest book, THE OTHER SIDE (2024), is something of a sequel to her first, SOMEWHERE CHILD, about the abduction of her daughter by her father, published by Viking Press in 1981. In this new memoir she brings readers up to the present, as a woman nearing eighty looking back on her life, still trying to answer unanswerable questions -- the main question being, Why would anyone do such a thing?
This new book is a quest, which invites readers along, to purposefully look at the other side of every issue raised. It is also a GIFT: To obtain a free copy, as either a Word.doc or a PDF, simply e-mail your request to Bonnie at bonnieleeblack@yahoo.com -- or you may simply click this link for a PDF copy:
THE OTHER SIDE .
Excerpts from a few readers’ responses to THE OTHER SIDE:
“I read it in two days and found it difficult to put down. … I would go beyond what you describe in the preface as ‘dispassionate’ and say this is a work of great maturity. Such a text is only possible after spending many years seeking to find the meaning in a traumatic event that seems as incomprehensible as it is devastating….”
~ ~ Paul Matteo, Somerville, Massachusetts
“What a riveting read! Only the requirement to sleep stopped me from reading all 157 pages in one go! It seemed as if every section ended with a cliffhanger so compulsive that you could not wait to read what came next. It is an absolutely amazing and beyond-belief account of real life experiences that most of us have been fortunate enough to escape….”
~ ~ Sandra Affleck, Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland
“Whew! What a read! This is a fabulous work, mesmerizing, a real page-turner. The backstory is heart-breaking, the emotion is gutting….”
~ ~ Paulette Valliere, Laconia, New Hampsire
SWEET TARTS FOR MY SWEETHEARTS:
Stories and Recipes from a Culinary Career
(Nighthawk Press, 2020).
For Bonnie Lee Black, writing and cooking have always been analogous. Both involve the thoughtful and loving preparation of something good for another's consumption. This cookbook is a compilation of some of Bonnie's favorite, tried-and-true sweet tart recipes, along with related stories, drawn from her twenty-year culinary career. Her message to readers is simple: "I hope that Sweet Tarts will inspire you to make one or two--or more---of these recipes from time to time, especially on special occasions and enjoy them with your own sweethearts."
Available from Nighthawk Press or from
Amazon at:
https://amzn.to/3l3zOmz
JAMIE'S MUSE
(Nighthawk Press, 2018)
The lost history of Bonnie Lee Black’s Scottish great-grandmother, Helen, has haunted the author for years. Why, as young newlyweds, did Helen and William Black leave their hometown, Kirriemuir,
Angus, Scotland, and immigrate to the “dark continent” of Africa in 1882?Bonnie's deep spiritual connection to her ancestor has inspired her to weave a tale, in this, her first novel, that is part fantasy and part history.
Helen and Will died just three years after settling in Natal, South Africa, just months after the birth of their first child, Bonnie’s grandfather, John. There is no record of their demise, no record of how their son ended up in an orphanage in Edinburgh, nor of how the 14-year-old boy stowed away on a ship to New York.
Bonnie lived in Africa for many years herself and writes with a sure sense of place and history, interwoven with the fantasy of Helen, her short life, and her imagined close friendship with Kirriemuir’s most famous son, J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.
~ ~ ~
This is from a review of Jamie's Muse by author Mag Dimond on her website www.magdimond.com:
"...I love that this story has all the twists and turns as we navigate through a landscape of historical record and the creative imaginings of the writer; we follow her around those turns but never get lost. I have long believed that really good stories are not necessarily linear sagas complete with traditional climaxes and resolutions, but rather an intersecting of mosaic pieces that come together over time to form a rich picture that is in fact a melding of “truth” and fiction. Bonnie Lee Black’s book feels like such a mosaic and it reminds me that we can mine the various mysteries that are present in our lives and fashion authentic, moving, and layered narratives to share with the world."
One reader, Kim Wallace of Southern California, whose book group read Jamie’s Muse, wrote to Bonnie:
“I wanted to pass on to you how much we all enjoyed discussing your book. For me particularly the concept of your taking a mysterious ancestor and turning that “unknown” into such a brilliant piece of fiction is amazing! Your ability to create [your great-grandmother] Helen as a person I could relate to and feel inspired by is to me a marvelous accomplishment. … I will gladly be recommending your book to everyone I know who likes to read such stories.”
Here is a glowing review by author Catherine Marenghi:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2842224897
And another lovely review, this one by author Terez Mertes Rose:http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/review-jamies-muse-by-bonnie-lee-black-gabon/
And a great review in The Taos News:
https://www.taosnews.com/stories/family-ties,51701
To hear a radio interview Bonnie did in Taos, NM, in advance of her September 16, 2018, reading from Jamie's Muse at SOMOS (the Society of the Muse of the Southwest) there, go to this link and scroll down to her name on the left-hand side:
http://culturalenergy.org/listenlinks.ht
New Mexico-Arizona Books Awards Finalist:HOW TO MAKE AN AFRICAN QUILT:
The Story of the Patchwork Project
of Ségou, Mali
(Nighthawk Press, 2013)
"This is an immensely evocative, superbly written, and profoundly moving narrative of Bonnie Lee Black's work with a group of remarkable Malian women. Her radiant humanity shines through on every page."
-- David Livingstone Smith, author of Less Than Human (St. Martins)
How do we sew together the hoped-for future and the unfortunate past, the bright as well as the darker patches of our lives? How do we stitch cultural differences, join disparate worlds, to create something both beautiful and useful? Bonnie Lee Black subtly addresses these universal questions through vivid stories of her life-changing experience living and working in the fabled city of Ségou, Mali, in West Africa, after having served for two years in the Peace Corps in Gabon.
At the request of a talented group of Malian seamstresses, Bonnie taught them the craft of American patchwork quilting and spearheaded an independent economic-development effort called the Patchwork Project. In this memoir she has created a many-layered patchwork quilt of a book that brings that time and place -- and all its colorful characters -- to life on the page.
Threaded throughout is the fictional narrative of Jeneba, a slave-quilter in the antebellum American South who had been kidnapped from the Kingdom of Ségou as a child, as well as the real voices of the Malian women who took part in the Patchwork Project.
Winner of a Best in the World award from Gourmand International, Paris:HOW TO COOK A CROCODILE:
A Memoir with Recipes
(Peace Corps Writers, 2010)
Casting caution to the wind at the age of fifty, New York caterer and food writer Bonnie Lee Black decided to close her catering business and join the Peace Corps. Posted to the tiny town of Lastoursville in the thickly rainforested interior of Gabon, Central Africa, Bonnie taught health, nutrition, and cooking, in French, primarily to local African women and children.
In the two years she served in Gabon, Bonnie developed her own healthy recipe for a purposeful life, made in equal measures of good food, safe shelter, meaningful work, and unexpected love. Like M.F.K. Fisher’s classic World War II-era book, How to Cook a Wolf, Bonnie’s true stories comprise a lively, literary, present-day survival guide.
How to Cook a Crocodile won first prize in the Charity and Community - North America category at the Gourmand International awards ceremony held at the Folies Bergeres in Paris on March 6, 2012.
Click here to watch a six-minute Pecha Kucha presentation of How to Cook a Crocodile.
SOMEWHERE CHILD (Viking Press, 1981)
Somewhere Child is Bonnie Lee Black's astonishing and beautifully told memoir of how she lived through the ordeal of parental kidnapping not once, but twice -- first in her suburban New Jersey community and then, several years later, in Salisbury, Rhodesia, where she had tracked her ex-husband down, and where, after a long and sensational legal battle, she once more won custody of her daughter, only to lose her yet again.... Black has assembled fragments of letters, journals, and court transcripts to create a spellbinding interior narrative recapturing those years. A compelling brief against child snatching, that perverse and tortuous form of domestic violence, Somewhere Child is filled with love and fury and heart-wrenching pain, and is ultimately a testimony to the resilience and fierceness of the human spirit.
-- Viking Press, New York,1981
"This book reconfirms for me the importance of the work we are doing to bring the problem of parental alienation to public awareness in the hopes of sparing future generations the pain and suffering that this author and her daughter had to endure."
-- Amy J. L. Baker, Ph.D., author and expert on PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome)
Find both eBook and available hardback copies of Somewhere Child at Amazon.
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