The Manikin A Novel [Paperback]

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'sThe Manikinis compulsively readable and beautifully written.

One readsThe Manikinin 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

Joanna Scottis the author of several books of fiction, including the novelsTourmalineandMake Believe, and the story collectionVarious Antidotes. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lannan Award, and lives with her family in Rochester, New York.