![]() ![]() ![]() One such project, a plan to restore the Mineral Palace, a crumbling edifice built in 1891 to express the town's boastful pride, when silver mining was its chief industry, proves to have a painful epiphanic significance as Bena finally confronts the fears and traumas that have constricted her life. Bena wins a job on the local newspaper, where she covers the numerous civic clubs that constitute social activism in the economically depressed community. Outwardly assured, Bena is subject to a surreptitious emotional tic: she obsessively adds and combines numbers-a birth date, her son's measurements, etc.-to divine signs and portents. ![]() Adding to these burdens are repressed memories of her domineering brother's death when they were young. The Depression, the drought-parched dust bowl landscape, her newborn son's strange lethargy and her knowledge that her husband, Ted, is an inveterate drinker and philanderer, cast grim shadows over Bena's attempts to come to terms with her future. This surreal event, and others that follow, invest this compelling, though not flawless, debut novel with a dreamlike immediacy. As they drive from Minnesota to her physician husband's new job in Pueblo, Colo., in 1934, Bena Jonssen encounters on-the-run bank thief Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde fame), who gives her a tarnished silver charm. ![]()
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