The Manikin - by Joanna Scott (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world-filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles-wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, Joanna Scott's The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

Review Quotes

"One reads The Manikin in a kind of fever....It is packed with extraordinary bounty." --Newsday

"Scott's prose is sensitive and beautifully crafted. She writes with subtlety, compassion and humor, and her characters are both eminently human and touched with magic and mystery." --The Washington Post Book World

"The wit, the magical prose and the daring devices of Scott's writing create an enchantment....Readers of The Manikin will remember Scott's novel as a landscape of time, and will remember that her soundings of the depth of our natures are as accurate and revealing as Thoreau's measurements of Walden Pond." --The Nation

About the Author

Joanna Scott is the author of several books of fiction, including the novels Tourmaline and Make Believe, and the story collection Various Antidotes. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, and lives with her family in Rochester, New York.