The Taxidermist's Apprentice
A Novel of the Blue Ridge

About this book:

In the mist-shrouded hollows of the Blue Ridge, Robin has traded a life of whispered expectations and ill-fitting names for an apprenticeship with Silas, a taxidermist who measures worth in steady hands and salt-stained fingers. Up here, the mountain doesn't care who you were in the valley—only whether you can peel a hide without tearing the follicles, rub salt into the grain until your knuckles bleed, and coax a bobcat's eyelid from bone with a scalpel's kiss. The work is bloody, precise, and utterly indifferent to the stories people tell about themselves.

As winter closes around Blackwood Hollow, Robin learns that preservation isn't about keeping things dead—it's about understanding the architecture of a living thing so completely that you can rebuild its shape from the inside out. Every hide carries the map of a creature's life: the scars, the fat laid down against hard seasons, the tension in muscle and tendon. And as Robin's hands learn the unspoken grammar of flesh and wire, they begin to recognize the same grammar in themself—the places where expectation carved grooves too deep, the soft tissue that survived beneath the pressure to conform.

*The Taxidermist's Apprentice* is a novel about the quiet violence of becoming, set in a world where fog eats headlights and the only truth is what your fingers know. For readers who love the atmospheric immersion of *The Great Alone* and the tender, tool-calloused intimacy of *The Bear*, this is a story of mentorship, mountain isolation, and the slow, deliberate act of giving yourself a shape that fits.