What a weird, darling book. I don't know quite what I was expecting going into it but I was not expecting fascinating taxidermy, confusing marital relationships, and deep grief. And if I had been expecting those things, I certainly wouldn't have expected them to be somehow...funny? This is an unusual and truly special book.

This book had some unexpected content in that was too triggering for me. This would be a better read for people who don’t need content warnings.

Incredibly well-developed characters drive this strange but compelling story about the utter mess that is familial relationships, especially in the wake of tragedy. Love and relationship can be found in strange places and Arnett definitely explores that skillfully bringing these deeply flawed, but deeply compelling characters to life along with a clear sense of place in this Florida community.

This novel is completely unique with an imaginative plot and jump-off-the-page characters. A Floridian story with humidity you can feel. I'll definitely be following Arnett's writing.

Enjoyable read! Humorous, but also dark and twisty at times. Loved the setting and learning more about the taxidermy profession. I'm still thinking about these intriguing characters weeks after finishing the book.

This quirky storyline stole my heart. Wasn’t sure at first if my cup of tea at first,, but the characters drew me in and won me over. A unique and diverse read that deserves highlighting.

A close-up exploration of grief, love, family, and taxidermy. Siblings Jess and Milo grieve the loss of their father in addition to the woman they both loved and lost, leaving Milo alone with two kids and Jess with an indefinitely broken heart. Meanwhile, Jess struggles to keep their family's taxidermy business afloat while her mother processes her own grief through explicit windowshop displays of her father's beloved taxidermy pieces-- something Jess struggles to understand much less accept. The family tries to stay afloat and stay together as they weather the tides of grief, life, and love--in all it's many forms.

Lovely prose and the exploration of all the ways in which we hold on to hurts and hurt others in turn because of it was really craftfully developed. Contemporary / literary fiction isn't usually my go to, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good read in that genre, especially if they want something that explores family and grief.

TW: suicide, lots of discussions of dead animals and taxidermy

Such a fun title! As a Floridian, I get vibes of home reading Arnett's work. And as someone who recently suddenly lost a father, the depiction of grief is very honest. Highly recommend!

The narrator is so slovenly and unlikable that I had to stop reading it and picked up something else. Ultimately, I ended up enjoying this story of repressed family members grieving over the loss of the loves of their lives.

This story is original and fascinating. Readers will learn about taxidermy. The incident with the peacocks is unfortunate, but necessary to the story. The is one minor reference to scrambling eggs and then dipping toast in yolks that may have been edited before final publication. Overall, the is novel is worth reading.

"As it is, I can't settle. I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever."

"There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill-treat, alter and recolor what's dead. It won't complain." Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson.

"Sometimes I hated the way I was. That I could look at an incredibly lovely woman and picture her mounted like a dead animal made me wonder what was wrong with my brain." -Mostly Dead Things

Jessa Lynn has always been the rock of her family. However, the way she has desensitized herself to the recently living animals she stuffs has left her desensitized from the rest of her life. The love of her life is gone and her father has committed suicide. Meanwhile, her mother is having a nervous breakdown and her brother won't look after his kids. Juxtapose that on top of the unruly nature of the Florida landscape makes for a very wild ride.

Jessa Lynn has taken over the declining taxidermy shop from her now-dead father. Her mother has begun to position the animals in strange sexual positions that have now attracted high priced buyers. Her brother's wife, Bryan has left without a word. When it is all unpacked we learn that Bryan was really the love of Jessa Lynn's life. Now she is just stuck with everyone's mess. Until she starts making her own.

A wild ride of a story. We learn the intimacies of taxidermy while she autopsies her own life and decisions. Can she learn from them or will she just recreate the history and erase the past with her skills?

NOTES FROM
Mostly Dead Things
Kristen Arnett

June 14, 2019
Sus Scrofa—Feral Pig, p. 39


It was hard to know what was happening in the movie when someone touched me in a way that made my skin feel peeled. Every nerve ending was exposed and frayed.




June 15, 2019
2, p. 45


It was what Central Floridians did: pave over everything so they could forget what had been there before. Theme parks and chain restaurants were built over homes and libraries. Banks took the place of family-owned businesses. There were highways built over historic areas; places where you wouldn’t know something had ever happened unless a person told you or you read about it in a book. The park where the Seminole once lived had been razed to build carnival space, which in turn had been repurposed as a power building that eventually became a Publix. No one ever seemed to remember what came before. A kind of local amnesia, my father called it. That particular portion of Morse held an old appliance store with a run-down ACE sign papering most of the front window, a locally-grown-food co-op, and the gallery.




June 15, 2019
2, p. 51


Sometimes I hated the way I was. That I could look at an incredibly lovely woman and picture her mounted like a dead animal made me wonder what was wrong with my brain.




June 16, 2019
Leporidae of the Order Lagomorpha—Rabbit Kits, p. 73


Will I ever get tired of this? I asked the question aloud, though I already knew the answer. You couldn’t get sick of sustenance when you were starving.




June 16, 2019
Ardea Alba—Great White Heron, p. 95


There was understanding in Brynn’s eyes when she looked at me. I really was only a girl to her; one who would be scared of a roach, while my brother, who couldn’t even scrape out the insides of a raccoon pelt without turning green, was the one who’d always be turned to for help. Of the two of us, he was the one who was squeamish. I stayed up late with him when he had a nightmare and got scared of imaginary monsters hiding under the clothes hamper. He was the one who cried over sad movies and let our mother comfort him when he hurt himself. I was the strong one, but because I was a girl, that’s all Brynn saw. Milo, scaredy-cat of the highest order, would always be the knight.




June 16, 2019
Ardea Alba—Great White Heron, p. 97


And I knew she was right, but a small, black part of me had seen how beautifully the bird’s feathers glistened in the sunshine and wished I could make it stay with me, always. So I cried for that: the fact that I was the kind of person who’d wish death on a creature just so I could make it my own.




June 22, 2019
Procyon Lotor—Common Raccoon, p. 181


Jessa-Lynn.




June 22, 2019
8, p. 210


Here I’d been thinking that we’d been lucking into an assortment of pricy work, when all along it’d been thanks to the murderous schemes of my nephew. How many animals had I cut into that he’d strangled the breath from? Run down with a car?




June 23, 2019
10, p. 270


I put my palm against the wall, remembering the first time we’d kissed in the office. How her whole body had swallowed mine. It felt good. Safe. I’d hated that because it didn’t feel how I expected romance to feel: stressful and kind of blood-soaked, a constant power struggle.




June 23, 2019
Ursus Arctos—Brown Bear, p. 274


After he proposed, he came home and told me she was so happy she cried. I didn’t really believe that. My brother was so overjoyed that he couldn’t stop smiling. Who was I to tell him that the thing he thought was truth was really just a woman trying to manufacture a normal life for herself?




June 23, 2019
Ursus Arctos—Brown Bear, p. 275


Are you kidding me? I pressed my face into a pillow, wanting to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. The love of my life popping her humongous zit in my mother’s vanity mirror while she prepped herself to marry my brother. And here we were, pretending it was normal. Normal for me to feed her shots the night before, licking sweat from her neck. Totally acceptable to dance together at a club with some of her work friends, grinding to the bass notes until I could feel her dampness on my leg. Completely fine for me to fuck her in the back seat of her car later that night, Cheerio crumbs stuck to my ass as we sweat and cried and came, over and over.




June 23, 2019
11, p. 295


Intimacy means giving up parts of yourself to someone, even when that means they can hurt you very badly. But sometimes we let them because pain can feel good too.” She pressed her palm against my cheek.




June 24, 2019
Cathartes Aura—Turkey Vulture, p. 324


He hated that cars just drove over them, continually, as if they couldn’t see there had once been a live thing there.




June 24, 2019
13, p. 341


Looping the string, my mother tied while I helped knot. There were two rolls for each of us: Lolee, Bastien, my mother, Milo, and myself. There’d be a big pitcher of tea and there’d be bread and there’d be a salad that nobody ate but my mother. The same, the same. Even when things changed, everything still went back to equilibrium.




All Excerpts From


Arnett, Kristen. “Mostly Dead Things.” Tin House Books, 2018-11-27. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.

Enjoyed the quirkiness and dry humor. Would be interested in the discussion this book could cultivate in a book club as well.

This story makes you feel uncomfortable. It's dirty, messy, smelly and embarrassing -- and that's exactly why it's so lovely. I had a hard time coming back to it because I didn't love how uncomfortable it made me feel, but that's the beauty of Kristen Arnett's writing. It'll make you think about the dirty, messy, smelly and embarrassing parts of yourself, too.

In this darkly humorous, southern Gothic novel, a family deals with the death of their taxidermist father in differing ways. His daughter Jessa, the narrator of the story, prepares to take over his taxidermy business. Jessa’s mother begins posing the taxidermied animals in lewd ways as a form of coping with her husband’s death and the frustrations of their marriage. Jessa’s brother’s wife, whom Jessa also is in love with, walks out on them leaving them both grasping for something to make sense. This is humorous and quirky with a heavy dose of morbidity, full of zany characters and awkward moments. Imagine Jenny Lawson wrote Southern Gothic novels, which she should definitely do. She might write something similar to this.

Depicting the story of a family of quirky taxidermists in Central Florida, Arnett very accurately portrays a family who becomes in many ways untethered when the family patriarch suddenly dies. Humor, drama, coming of age and a generous sprinkle of Florida wackiness, gives Arnett's novel an edge that is unique and very hard to put down.

One morning, Jessa finds her father's body in his taxidermy shop along with a suicide note. While dealing with her grief and trying to keep the shop running, she also must try to keep her family together as they fall to pieces. Her mother has taken to rearranging the animals in the window into bawdy sex scenes, while her brother, niece, and nephew grapple with life after Jessa's sister-in-law walked out on them. And if she's being honest, she's not over her secret love affair with her sister-in-law either.

This book is bizarre and unflinching and wonderful. Arnett is not afraid of the repulsive, both in dead animals and in living humans. This is a book about taxidermy and wacky families, but it's about so much more, too. It's about how hard it is to love a living being, how you wish you could capture one perfect moment with someone you've loved and lost, and how that never turns out quite how you hoped. It's about the limits of knowing someone inside and out, and it's about closure. I loved every weird page of this book.

3.5 stars? I'm can't decide between 3 and 4. Despite being told up front that the story centers on a family of taxidermists, I didn't think that it would deal so much with actual taxidermy. Jessa, the daughter and main character, takes over the business after her dad commits suicide. Through the course of the book, we watch the family fall apart and come back together, all while stuffing dead animals. I loved how natural Jessa's homosexuality was dealt with. It wasn't a "thing," it was just part of her. So many books make it a big event. This was just Jessa. I didn't like how much the story bounced around. It was too easy to get lost in memories because the reader isn't dealing with multiple timelines but instead going from moment to moment. In the end, almost everything is tied up nicely, at least enough to leave the reader having enjoyed a good story. Maybe just don't plan to read while eating?

While this was an interesting book, it was just too slow for me. I love a good dysfunctional family, and this absolutely has that in spades, but it wasn’t what I expected based on the blurb. The flashbacks were often unnecessary, and the book could have easily been reduced by 100 pages. I liked the writing a lot, so I’m going to have to say this is most likely a case of poor editing. I would give this author another chance though, because there is definitely talent there.p

Mostly Dead Things is a weird and funny and sad book about grief and family, with one of the strongest senses of place (taxidermy in swampy hot Florida!) that I’ve read in a long long time. It’s also fantastically queer, in an uncomfortable “I see myself in this, it’s too good, make it stop” kind of way. I would read it all over again, right now.

A strange and strangely moving debut by Kristen Arnett. Known for her peculiar and wry Florida brand of humor on Twitter, this novel is less outwardly funny, and ends up being a surprisingly introspective look at grief, love, and the pieces of ourselves we give up for other people.