The Book of Atlantis Black: The Search for a Sister Gone Missing

by Betsy Bonner

Overview

An NPR Best Book of 2020

"A haunting, mind-bending memoir. . . . riveting." —New York Times

"A mixture of biography and true crime, this narrative . . . offers more plot twists, shocking revelations and shady characters than most contemporary thrillers." —NPR

The Book of Atlantis Black will have you questioning facts, rooting for secrets, and asking what it means to know the truth.

A young woman is found dead on the floor of a Tijuana hotel room. An ID in a nearby purse reads “Atlantis Black.” The police report states that the body does not seem to match the identification, yet the body is quickly cremated and the case is considered closed.

So begins Betsy Bonner’s search for her sister, Atlantis, and the unraveling of the mysterious final months before Atlantis’s disappearance, alleged overdose, and death. With access to her sister’s email and social media accounts, Bonner attempts to decipher and construct a narrative: frantic and unintelligible Facebook posts, alarming images of a woman with a handgun, Craigslist companionship ads, DEA agent testimony, video surveillance, police reports, and various phone calls and moments in the flesh conjured from memory. Through a history only she and Atlantis shared—a childhood fraught with abuse and mental illness, Atlantis’s precocious yet short rise in the music world, and through it all an unshakable bond of sisterhood—Bonner finds questions that lead only to more questions and possible clues that seem to point in no particular direction. In this haunting memoir and piercing true crime account, Bonner must decide how far she will go to understand a sister who, like the mythical island she renamed herself for, might prove impossible to find.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947793774
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	161,042
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Betsy Bonner is the author of Round Lake, a poetry collection published by Four Way Books. She is a faculty member of the Writer’s Foundry M.F.A. program at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, New York and the former Director of the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center, where she teaches an annual poetry seminar. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, The Brooklyn Quarterly and The Southampton Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, Eliot House and the VCCA, and a mentor in PEN’s Prison Writing Program.

Editorial Reviews

"Maddening and fascinating. The reader is made to feel what it’s like to be denied answers in an essential search."

Amy Hempel

"An unforgettable portrait of an impossible yet compelling young woman taken down by her own demons, and fighting every step of the way."

David Gates

"Haunting, mind-bending. . . . A wrenching portrait."

The New York Times Book Review

"You'll read it in one sitting."

HelloGiggles

"Gripping. . . . Betsy Bonner is the storyteller, but Atlantis Black is the story, the mystery, the victim, sometimes the perpetrator and always the question."

NPR

"Betsy Bonner writes with the precision of a poet and the courage of a survivor. I could not put this book down."

Domenica Ruta

"Betsy Bonner has crafted a terse, urgent page-turner that is equally ode, elegy, and mystery."

Chelsey Johnson

"Part exorcism and part adoring tribute, The Book of Atlantis Black is deeply haunting and darkly fascinating."

Starred Review BookPage

"Suspenseful and beautiful. . . . I’m speechless."

Jeannie Vanasco

"This memoir is as haunting, as memorable, and as magnetic as the tragic young woman at its core. I tore through it at lightning speed but I also didn’t want it to end."

Amanda Fortini

"Lyrical and compelling."

Booklist

[A] piercing true crime investigation. ... The Book of Atlantis Black assumes the qualities of the departed musician herself: marked by yearning, it revolves around absences and is irresistible to the end.”

Foreword Reviews

★ 04/01/2020

Bonner (creative writing, St. Joseph's Coll.; Round Lake) invites readers into the intimate, complex search for her sister, Atlantis Black, and the unsettling circumstances surrounding her disappearance. Bonner skillfully blends aspects of true crime, from Atlantis's mysterious relationships to challenges of the investigation, with a thoughtful, lyrical memoir. The resulting story is personal and poetic. The investigation into Atlantis's disappearance is interwoven with Bonner's memories of their childhood, and the mental illness and abuse within their family. Atlantis's voice appears throughout the book in social media posts, emails, and video transcripts, lending personality to the story's central figure and allowing readers to create a connection with her. Bonner's writing is measured as it moves seamlessly from investigation to reflection. Readers interested in the intersections of crime, memoir, and family may also enjoy Leah Carroll's Down City: A Daughter's Story of Love, Memory, and Murder. VERDICT A haunting, profound investigative memoir that will resonate with readers as both a compelling true crime story and an affecting literary work. Bonner creates a sense of closeness with readers that makes this book a challenge to put down or forget. [See Prepub Alert, 1/29/2020.]—Kate Bellody, SUNY New Paltz

Library Journal

2020-04-22
When a troubled young musician disappears, her sister searches for something more profound than answers.

In her debut memoir, poet and educator Bonner reflects not only on her sister Nancy’s (she renamed herself Atlantis Black) disappearance, but also on the shadows that have haunted her family. What begins with a resume of the sisters’ youth transforms into a psycho-thriller murder mystery with a charmingly unreliable narrator. The author lays the blame for her sister’s mental illness, the root of her demise, unambiguously on their father’s abuse, their mother’s manic depression, and the sexual entitlement of the boys at school. Wrought in unsentimental, candid prose, the depictions of their childhood showcase Bonner’s poetic sensibilities, as she displays powerful control over imagery, suspense, and irony. As the girls matured, the author achieved a high level of education, professional success, and some stable relationships. Meanwhile, Atlantis revealed only glimpses of her precarious existence to her sister. Shady characters, illegal activity, drug abuse, and financial desperation pepper their correspondence, which Bonner intersperses through the primary narrative. Atlantis’ voice, rich with suffering and paranoia and tender with love and vulnerability, lives on through this dramatic memoir. The author clearly tried to strike a delicate balance between helping without derailing her own life, being supportive without enabling, and living fully without abandoning a needy loved one. The secrets of Atlantis’ life eventually became a chasm in which Bonner began to lose her stable sense of reality. By the end, the lucky sister has begun to embody some of her female relatives’ instability, and she constantly questions herself. She believes, at least partially, the official story of Atlantis’ drug-related death in Tijuana, and while she does want to know what happened, she’d prefer to know why and how it could have gone differently.

Carefully crafted, haunting, and absorbing, this thrilling memoir echoes in the head and heart long after the final page.

Kirkus Reviews

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