Breath and Bones - Paperback

by Susan Cokal (Author)

In 1884, Famke Summerfugl is ousted from her convent in Denmark for ... sensuousness and pulled from servitude by a second-rate painter named Albert Castle. Loving to be looked at, and able to stand perfectly still without shivering, Famke is the ideal artist's model.

When Albert takes his eight-foot masterpiece and leaves his model behind, Famke sets out over the Atlantic, convinced that she is his muse.

Following Mirabilis, her highly acclaimed debut, Susann Cokal blends pre-Raphaelite painting, American brothels, Utahan polygamists, a bit of cross-dressing, a dynamite-wielding labor movement, one California millionaire, and the invention of electrical stimulation (as treatment for consumption) into a comic novel that gallops across the American west.

Front Jacket

As a slightly bawdy road novel in the tradition of Fanny Hill and Tom Jones and because of its narrating freshness and its twisted historic perspective, Susan Cokal's second wholly unique comic novel should appeal to readers of Jeffrey Eugenide's Middlesex and Jonathan Saffran Foer's Everything is Illuminated. The story begins in an orphanage in Denmark, where 15-year-old Famke learns about pleasure. Once she's ousted from The Convent of the Immaculate Heart, she becomes an artist's model and discovers how much she likes to be looked at. By the time Cokal has finished with her, Famke has learned a great deal more from her travels through the American West, and yet she remains charmingly naove -- almost to the novel's breathtaking, and literally explosive ending.