Alice Greenway launched into the literary world with White Ghost Girls?a haunting and sensuous debut about two sisters tumbling into their teenage years in Hong Kong in the late 1960's?which won the Los Angeles Times First Novel award and was heralded by critics from the New York Times Book Review to Vogue to Isabel Allende, who wrote that it was "written with the craft and grace of a master."
In her exquisitely rendered new novel, Greenway tells the story of Jim Carroway, a World War II Vietnam Vet once called Jungle Jim, who has moved to a tiny island in Maine to seclude himself from his former life. It is 1974 and all Jim wants is to be alone, to drink, nurse his amputated leg and write an article on where he believes Robert Louis Stevenson's real Treasure Island is. Once Jim was a noted ornithologist collecting and skinning birds as specimens he sent back to the Museum of Natural History in New York where he worked. Since his amputation, his lifelong work has become impossible. Now hiding out on Fox Island, away from his adult son and grandchildren in Connecticut and his colleagues in New York, he is depressed and in pain.
Jim's slowly deteriorating mind unravels memories that take him back to the war in Guadalcanal, where he was with Naval Intelligence, spying on the Japanese for Admiral Halsey on a remote Solomon Island. There he became friends with a young native, Tosca, who taught him about the islands. Now in Maine, Jim finds out that Tosca, whom he hasn't heard from in thirty years, is sending his daughter Cadillac to stay with him for a month before she starts Yale on a scholarship. Cadillac arrives to Jim's consternation, but she is utterly captivating, totally original. She will capture his heart and the heart of everyone she meets.
Rich in island detail, redolent of Maine in the summer and winter, and of the Solomon islands, comprised of lush and poetic prose, The Bird Skinner is a wise, wrenching, exhilarating and unforgettable masterpiece from an extraordinarily skillful novelist.
