![]() ![]() ![]() As frequent collectors of unusual persons-they employ Celestial Song Tu-Li and Zuni man/woman (hermaphrodite) Tahktoo-the so-called Savage Girl is of more importance by far to the Delegates, a living experiment to be gentled from savagery to civilization via education and exposure to society’s finest people. A private train travels from New York to Virginia City, Nevada, where the fabulously wealthy Delegate family (their fortune from financial legerdemain in silver speculation) heads toward the potential discovery of a feral child starring in a back-alley sideshow.Ībsorbed in the current intellectual vanities of the times, patriarch Friedrich Delegate plans to put an exclamation point on the ongoing argument of nature versus nurture in an era that features such luminaries as William James, Charles Darwin, Edith Wharton and Victoria Woodhull with her coterie of strident feminists. ![]() Zimmerman draws on the disparate characteristics of East and West in the Gilded Age (circa 1875) in a mystery/romance that marries the rough-shod boom towns of the West Coast with the sophistication of New York’s elite, where a surfeit of wealth and excess crown the powerful as the royalty of a democratic society. Book review: Jean Zimmerman's *Savage Girl* ![]()
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