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.

March 1, 2014

Ailing and bitter, retired ornithologist Jim Carroway retreats to a Maine island in the summer of 1973 after a leg amputation. He spends his days drinking heavily, reading Hemingway, and rebuffing any help. Previously, Jim was a distinguished staff member at the Museum of Natural History in New York who ventured all over the world collecting birds, skinning them, and preparing them as specimens. Now Jim's grim solitude is disturbed by the unexpected arrival of an exotic visitor, a friendly and self-assured young woman named Cadillac, who has come to America to study medicine at Yale University. She is the daughter of his old colleague and islander Tosca, whom Jim met while stationed in the Solomon Islands during World War II. Her visit triggers harrowing memories of Jim's wartime experiences spying on the Japanese from behind enemy lines, as the story moves back and forth among 1973, 1943, and Jim's unhappy youth in 1917. VERDICT This is a haunting and beautifully written story about the long shadows that war casts on those who suffer through it. Greenway (White Ghost Girls) offers a surprisingly moving and sympathetic portrayal of a difficult man determined to face life on his own terms. [See Prepub Alert, 7/22/13.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

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