The Oprah Magazine (which I've never read) says "Will steal your heart." It was right. I was thoroughly engrossed by both the story, and by the character of Willie Sutton.

Mr. Moehringer has written Willie as a sympathetic character -- someone who tried to be good but circumstances kept getting in his way. Someone who loved to read and educate himself. Someone devoted for life to his one, true love. A folk hero who robbed the evil banks and never hurt a regular person. Maybe not an accurate portrayal (Willie Sutton was a real person), but it worked in the novel.

The late scene with Kate broke my heart. The final chapter where Reporter is looking back over things was anti-climatic in comparison, but it brought closure for Reporter, and showed how Willie's infamy had come to an end.

So well written. It grabbed me from the beginning. Life in the 1920s and 30s in New York was so well described, as were the prison conditions Willie endured. A truly great read! ( )

Fictionalized biography of sorts of an early 1900s NYC bank robber/folk hero. Some beautiful stuff but nothing life-changing. ( )

Continuo ad essere affascinato da questo autore che riesce a raccontare le vite vissute dai suoi protagonisti in modo favoloso. ( )

A very enthralling & sympathetic tale. I can easily sympathize with Willie, trying so hard to live a good life but being stymied time after time by economic events out of his control.
By the time we get to the last chapter, I start to think that Moehringer is speaking about himself, an perception that I didn't get earlier in the story, where the Reporter is not necessarily mentioned sympathetically. ( )

Book on CD narrated by Dylan Baker


Book on CD narrated by Dylan Baker

Everyone knows the Willie Sutton quote; asked why he robbed banks, Sutton purportedly said, “That’s where the money was.” Of course, this was later questioned, but it has remained part of the Sutton lore. In this historical fiction novel, Moehringer tries to explain why Willie robbed all those banks. In a brief author’s note Moehringer relates that after spending half his life in prison, Sutton was released from Attica on Christmas Eve 1969. He spent the entire day with a reporter and a photographer, retracing the steps of his personal history through the boroughs of New York City. The resulting article, however, was curiously sparse in detail. Moehringer writes: “Sadly, Sutton and the reporter and the photographer are all gone, so what happened among them that Christmas, and what happened to Sutton during the preceding sixty-eight years, is anyone’s guess. This book is my guess. But it’s also my wish.”

I wanted to like this. I remember the hoopla when Sutton was released in 1969, and I’ve always been fascinated by true crime works. I knew this was a novel, however, I expected something along the lines of other novels I’ve read that are “fictionalized biographies.”

The trouble I had here was Moehringer’s chosen device: following Sutton, the reporter and the photographer throughout Christmas day 1969, and then having Sutton recall one event after another from his past. It just didn’t work for me. I would be involved in the past and then yanked to the back seat of the car while Willie’s scarfing down donuts provided by the photographer. I also didn’t like the author’s choice to call his characters not by name, but by their roles in Sutton’s life: Photographer, Reporter, Left Cop, Right Cop, etc. It annoyed me.

On the plus side, I really liked the sections where we were living in Sutton’s past. Moehringer brought the 1920s and 1930s to life in his descriptions and scenes on the streets of Brooklyn, or in the prison cells in which Sutton was held. The text version of the book also includes a map of the route taken by Sutton and the reporter on Christmas Day; I found that helpful at times.

Dylan Baker does a credible job of narrating the audiobook. It’s difficult to follow at times because of the constant moving back and forth in time. The text version uses different fonts to give the reader a clue, but the person listening to the audio version doesn’t get any such clue. That’s not the narrator’s fault, it’s the author’s. ( )