Remember how I fussed and fumed over [b:The Movement of Stars|15815363|The Movement of Stars|Amy Brill|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1350922610s/15815363.jpg|21541859] and how a completely fictional romance was shoehorned into a real person's life, presumably to make it more interesting? And how I complained that whenever the protagonist is a woman, it seems like there has to be a grand romantic sub-plot, but when the protagonists are men, it doesn't?

I take it back. I lied. Here is a book, about a man, written by a man, that does the EXACT SAME THING.

J.R. Moehringer got the idea for the novel while wanting to write a non-fiction book about how evil modern banks are. But he went this route instead. Willie Sutton was a "gentleman bankrobber" whose career spanned the 20s through the 50s, included 3 jailbreaks, and caused him to be somewhat of a folk hero. Overall, a good subject for a novel. And I saw an interview with the author where he talked about the importance of following history, just filling in the gaps, that he thinks this is what historical fiction readers want to experience. He said this is what he did -- no CHANGING history, just following it and adding his own imagination where no evidence exists.

...Woe, WOE to authors who make those promises and then don't follow through! A good historical fiction will make me look up the subject, and then I will KNOW what you did and did not do!

So as I said at the beginning, this book takes (and runs with) the idea that a girl Willie met early on -- Bess Endner -- is the grand love of his life and that his whole life of crime somehow revolves around her and his love for her. (This is not a spoiler, it becomes evident very early in the book.)

Almost unmentioned go his two real life wives and his real life daughter...less than a paragraph is devoted in total to the three of them. Moehringer's determination to give Willie Sutton an Anakin Skywalkeresque "I did it all for love" character arc means it's all Bess Bess Bess, all the time. Never mind that in my opinion, it would have been way more interesting to see a career criminal's interactions with his REAL wives, his REAL daughter, as opposed to some fakey relationship (fakey in that there's no historical evidence that Moehringer's hypothesis is true, and fakey in that even in the novelverse the romance barely passes the 1/4 of the way mark before it's all just remembrances). Because we're so focused on that, we see very little of Willie's life -- we don't even get a good walkthrough of any of his famous bank heists!! Usually I complain of too little going on in characters' heads, but this is the opposite--we spend so much time in Willie's head we don't get to see his life.

Also, whatever you do,

Spoiler

don't get interested enough in Bess Endner that you google her and find a PDF of a contemporaneous NYT article that gives away the ENTIRE FREAKING ENDING. The whole, ludicrous, "WTF this is on a par with chimpanzee Lincoln from Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes" ending.

Maybe I'm just not a romantic, but I don't understand this trope in literature, TV, and movies. I find it trite, dull, and not terribly realistic. And when it's laid over an actual historical figure who seems way more complex than this, it bothers me doubly.

It's probably a book still worth reading, but I don't know that it's a book worth buying -- pick it up at the library.

That said, the cover is sexy as hell. Look at that! Yowza.