Bonita by Carl R. Brush

Meet Bonita. Often reckless, often victimized, a deeply spiritual person who transforms herself from a rebellious adolescent into a prominent entrepreneur. When we meet her as a twelve-year-old in 1843, her future looks idyllic—a privileged life on a hacienda overlooking San Francisco Bay. But her penchant for eavesdropping and her feisty willfulness wreck everything. She learns that she’s not who she’s been told she was, and she strikes out on her own to discover the truth. Along the way, she becomes immersed in the swirl of historic events that surrounds her—the Mexican-American war, the gold rush, California drive for statehood. An intense romance both complicates and enhances quest. Her search and its discoveries create fresh challenges, challenges she meets with the originality and boldness that by that point we’ve come to expect of this extraordinary woman named Bonita. From writer Dan Barth, author of, among other fine works, The Day After Hank Williams’ Birthday: Prose Pieces & Poems and Fast Women Beautiful: Zen Beat Baseball Poems This historical novel, set in Northern California in the 1840s, opens with the 12-year-old title character intent on learning how to rope a grizzly. The result is not at all what she expects. The thing she lassos turns out to be more like a whirlwind. From Sausalito to Yerba Buena, up and down the San Francisco Bay, north to Sonoma and south to Monterey, she gamely hangs on to her end of the rope. Like Bonita, readers of this Carl Brush novel are in for a wild ride.