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Monkey Magnolia
Paperback
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher Price: $17.99
Publisher: Monkey Magnolia
Published: Nov 10 2026
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.49
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
The first New World monkey and his journey to become the first American astronaut.
People forget NASA started with a stolen rocket, a captive scientist, and a poached monkey.
- R.L. Rob
His name was Boyo. And for seventy-five years, he was redacted from history.
Before America reached the Moon, before NASA had a snazzy logo, before the Cold War learned how to smile for the cameras, a rocket built for Hitler stood upright in the New Mexico desert, straining toward the stars.
Inside was a monkey.
His name was Boyo.
A mysterious rhesus macaque, Boyo slips through the hidden corridors of twentieth-century history-from the sacred monkey temples of the Himalayas to Depression-era backroads, from the ragged soul of the Mississippi Delta to secret government laboratories and the captured German V-2 rockets that would become the unlikely foundation of America's race into space.
Boyo moves through history as trickster, survivor, and spiritual touchstone-the inexplicable missing link whose presence reveals something hidden in everyone he encounters. Wherever he goes, something shifts: a life changes course, a mystery deepens, or the ordinary world briefly gives way to wonder.
His journey crosses paths with William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Doc Ed Ricketts, J. Edgar Hoover, Wernher von Braun, John Wayne, drifters, bluesmen, scientists, government agents, dreamers, fools, and one genuine Indian guru who understands what Boyo is long before anyone else does.
Set against the fading grandeur and restless contradictions of 1940s America, Monkey Magnolia braids meticulously researched history with Southern Gothic, myth, music, Cold War paranoia, philosophical mischief, and the gloriously absurd. It is a fable about freedom and captivity, genius and madness, survival and belonging-and the lives conveniently erased from the official version of history.
Because before rockets carried Americans toward the Moon, they carried the ghosts of another war. Before Wernher von Braun became an American space-age hero, he built weapons for Hitler. And before America sent its heroes into space, it sent animals.
One of them was Boyo.
The government called him a test subject.
History forgot him.
That was the idea.
Boyo puts the monk in monkey.
A Southern Gothic fever dream, Monkey Magnolia is Cold War history unbent and reimagined as it must have been.
A stolen rocket. A captive scientist. A poached monkey.
And one hell of a way to start the Space Age.
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