The Bird Skinner

October 7, 2013
Isolated, insular ornithologist Jim Carroway, protagonist of Greenway’s evocative second novel (after White Ghost Girls), has been drawn to islands all his life, so it’s no wonder that in old age, having lost his wife, his leg, and the will to live, he withdraws to the Maine island where he passed his childhood summers. There he remains, confined by disability, drink, memory, and guilt, until the daughter of a Melanesian boy he befriended in wartime arrives from the Solomon Islands to disturb his miserable peace. In image-rich language, Greenway describes Penobscot Bay’s Fox Island in the 1970s, the Pacific islands during World War II, and Cumberland Island, Georgia, in 1917. Each island features its own landscape and birdlife, which Greenway captures in words and drawings scattered throughout the text. As an adult, Jim works on the island of Manhattan, at the Museum of Natural History, where he catalogues bird specimens with bird skins, many of which he’s collected himself. The distinctive environments of disparate islands, interwoven with alternately romantic and horrific flashbacks, create a beautiful, ultimately painful story as haunting as its settings. Gifted at evoking places in the past, Greenway is at her most poignant in moments when outsiders and natives, from hot climates and cold, come face to face, attempting to connect across geographic, cultural, emotional, and psychological divides. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, Inkwell Management.