Cry Dance is Helen Bonner’s breakthrough novel.  She is the author of two classic memoirs, Laid Daughter and First Love Last.

What if you knew there is no death?  How would it change your life?  Growing up clairvoyant in a reservation town wasn’t easy, but before her time in L.A.’s jail, Lorinda LeClair was Homecoming Queen, lead singer for the Bishop Babes, best bud of  Bonnie, humorous Paiute, and girlfriend of the sweetest guy on the basketball team. Orphaned at six, she still has occasional visits from her deceased mother, who reminds her, “There is no death, only love. We are all one.”   But in L.A., a busboy she befriended forces her to violent action, and Richard is deployed to Iraq so bitter she fears he’ll get himself killed. Lonely, she sings to him at night, and her voice wins a job in a nightclub, and a small following.

After a reservation fire, she finds Bonnie living on the streets, and breaks probation to take her home to their beloved Sierras, but Bonnie dies in a tragic snowstorm.  After joining the Paiutes in the Cry Dance, Lorinda has had enough of her mother’s teachings. She becomes LaRinda, torrid, sexy, rap singer, protégé of a sophisticated Lebanese producer, and lands a USO performance in Baghdad, determined to find Richard. In that cauldron of violence, she is taken hostage.  She must use all her wits, gifts, and insights to save herself and the man she loves.  Will it be enough?

Cry Dance is a sweeping saga that catapults the reader from the sacred rituals of a Sierra Paiute tribe to the luxurious penthouse of a Hollywood drug lord, to beleaguered sands of Baghdad.  Mystical and mysterious, the story is full of surprises and insights.  Lorinda LeClair is a heroine you’ll never forget.  Cry Dance is a novel you won’t put down.      

- Antoinette May, author of  Pilot’s Wife and Sacred Well.

Like Louise Erdrich’s Beet Queen, Cry Dance brings into gentle and sometimes humorous focus the challenges of  reservation Indians in the white world.  Like Ann Patchet’s Bel Canto, Cry Dance portrays the power of music to transform.  Like Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Cry Dance portrays the redeeming power of love.