One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, … withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife–and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with–walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates–picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose–and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them. Kristen Arnett’s debut novel is a darkly funny, heart-wrenching, and eccentric look at loss and love
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Mostly Dead Things packs messed-up families, scandalous love affairs, art, life, death and the great state of Florida into one delicious, darkly funny package. Kristen Arnett is wickedly talented and a wholly original voice.
I really wanted to like this book, but it just wasn’t for me. Thought of quitting in the first few pages, wish I had.
Kristen Arnett writes about a Florida I got to know in my own childhood: unmown lawns, carpets that smell of mildew, unreliable adults and questionable futures. With taxidermy as its central theme, this is for strong stomachs only, but if you don’t mind the subject matter, you’ll actually learn quite a lot about how animals go from roadkill to trophy–along with a story about love, revenge, and the twisted roads we travel with our families.
Mostly Dead Things is a book that’s mainly about grief. It focuses on the main character Jessa’s life with her family in the aftermath of her father’s suicide and how she’s trying to keep everything afloat (everything meaning her father’s taxidermy business as well as her family).
I really enjoyed the way Arnett portrays this very damaged character’s life, and we get a decent look into what built this woman and how that damage bleeds into everything and everyone around her. It’s not a loud or complicated story, but at the same time the emotions are very real, and there is a good message about how we can and should carry loss in our lives.
A part of me wishes Arnett had taken things a bit further and added more complications to the story, but the more I think about it, the softness of the resolution was fitting.
Arnett manages to be irreverent and funny, while also striking deeper emotional chords. Moreover, I would never have been sold on a book about taxidermy, if I wasn’t gripped by Arnett’s writing. What may look like a book about a queer female taxidermist in Florida, is also just a great book about family and love and passion and loss and self-sabotage and redemption. I never gave two thoughts to taxidermy, but enjoyed Arnett’s poetic descriptions and use of taxidermy for metaphor and setting. The sum of all these parts was a true achievement.
If Heather Lewis and Joy Williams had a child it might be this―I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel like it. There’s a gunslinger cool to every sentence, like someone is telling you the last story they’ll ever tell you. Kristen Arnett is the queen of the Florida no one has ever told you about, and on every page she brings it to a steely and vivid life.
Mostly Dead Things is one of the strangest and funniest and most surprising first novels I’ve ever read. A love letter to Florida and to family, to half-lit swamps and the 7/11, and to the beasts that only pretend to hold their poses inside us. In Kristen Arnett’s expert hands, taxidermy becomes a language to capture our species’ impossible and contradictory desire to be held and to be free.
Kristen Arnett has written a portrait of an American family grieving their dead and their living, and lovingly tearing one another to shreds in the process. Too, this is a book about salvaging, about the Mortons’ refusal to abandon what remains, to be buoys and co conspirators for one another’s hearts. Mostly Dead Things is a vicious and tender beast, alive with wry humor and the undeniable beauty of the ways we love.