When she was just sixteen months

old, Whitney Jason was stolen from her

mother. But Whitney s mother, Bonnie,

couldn t get her back. Like 100,000

other single parents to whom this

happens every year, she could not have

the kidnapper sought and tried on crim-

inal charges--because the kidnapper

was Whitney s father, Jim, Bonnie s ex-

husband.

Somewhere Child is Bonnie Lee

Black s astonishing and beautifully told

memoir of how she lived through this

ordeal not once, but twice--first in her

suburban New Jersey community and

then, four years later, in Salisbury, Rho-

desia, 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.

This is the story of a sensitive, naive

young girl who at nineteen became a

trusting, naive young wife; of a mother

who, bereft of her child, refused to for-

get her. It is the account of a girl becom-

ing a woman--a woman who somehow

found the courage to keep looking for

her missing daughter and the strength

to go forward with her life when the

search itself became impossible.

Bonnie Lee Black has assembled

fragments of letters, journals, and court

transcripts to create a spellbinding inte-

rior narrative recapturing those years. A

compelling brief against child snatch-

ing, that perverse and tortuous form of

domestic violence, Somewhere Child is

filled with love and fury and heart-

wrenching pain, and is ultimately a tes-

timony to the resilience and fierceness