I enjoyed this quirky character-driven novel, even as I wanted to shake every character and tell them to grow up and pull it together. I loved the unique setting and story elements, and the way it all came together in the end.

First I think it should be noted that if you are at all squeamish this is not the book for you. It has a good bit of taxidermy description from the get go.

Overall, I found it to be a very slow read that didn't draw me in. I personally didn't feel any connection with the main characters, and in fact most of them I really disliked or was even disgusted by. The story of how a family handles, and ultimately survives tragedy is meaningful, and it was a nice ending. The description made the book sound interesting and funny. In the end it was an okay story that didn't cause me any chuckles.

Mostly Dead Things is a unique book that has interesting characters and storyline. Well written, enjoyable,and some taxidermy on top.

This is a visceral, gritty love letter to Florida in the same grisly, macabre way Fincher's Se7en was to NYC. It is an utterly weird, quirky book that contained elements I never even knew I wanted to read about until now: dysfunctional families, the hot-and-humid raw side of backwater Florida, taxidermy. Kudos to Arnett's brilliantly bizarre mind.

Mostly Dead Things is a story of sewing open wounds left behind by the people you love, of the different ways people handle dimensional monsters like grief and trauma in their own ways, of how things fall apart. One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into her family's taxidermy workshop to find her father's body. Henceforth the cookie crumbles: she struggles to keep up with a failing business alone, mourning; her brother is absent and lost; her mother acts out and begins using their displays to make completely wacky art. I crave more of the chaos. I loved seeing everything fall apart -- because sometimes they have to, in order to start rebuilding things.

Arnett's writing is very unique. She does not flinch from candor, from violence and gore; everything is as gross and down-to-earth as it should be, yet this very move takes on a mutilated elegance of its own. Of course, there were a number of problems that I felt iffy about -- the odd relationship between Milo and Brynn and Jessa, for instance -- but everything worked. Everything worked towards portraying every character authentically as they overcame and accepted, and I loved that.

I loved that they were each dealing with more than a single thing, that Jessa's father's suicide was just a catalyst for so much more for every single person. I loved that the characters did not handle things with grace, but that regardless of how flawed and screwed up they were, they had their reasons. People leave. People grieve and mourn. People do stupid things. That's how it should be depicted. That's how it really is. That's real life. We let things crash and burn and try to salvage the remains after we've stomped all over them, but we forget that others do the same too.

So for all the flaws this book had, there was something immensely compelling about its quirky narration. It was absorbing because it was human. It was a story so simultaneously vivid and dull that I could feel every moment of the Florida setting, and I was both repulsed and immersed completely. I can tell opinions will definitely be mixed. If anything, Mostly Dead Things is weird in a way only the best books can be.

The Morton family runs a taxidermy shop in central Florida. Since the sudden death of her father who she'd always idolized, Jessa-Lynn is floundering, trying to deal with her mother Libby's long-stifled creative talents which are running amok (manifesting in pornographic anthropomorphic dead animal displays), and unable to connect with or rely on her younger brother Milo since the shared object of their affection up and left them both.

Narrator Jessa's grief, anguish and the Morton sibling-Brynn love triangle, are all extreme, confounding and palpable. Throughout the book I was conscious of a running theme of women and their long hair and the radical cutting of it. I like how tolerant the mom's conservative friends end up being for her. And I like the redemption arc several characters undergo. It's sad how little the Mortons know about each other at the outset, but gratifying to see them open up and develop towards the end, and I liked how it culminated in the merging of taxidermy with arts and crafts. I worried a lot about the self-destructive narrator's well-being throughout this book --financially, mentally, public health-wise; and Brynn's daughter Lolee's actions confused me, I couldn't tell how old she was supposed to be when she's licking the car window, and biting her aunt's denim-clad knee.

I was left with a lot of questions, like where were all the exotic animals coming from, why did Jessa feel entitled to that bearskin rug, and why wouldn't her father put that dying dog out of its misery already; but I give Kristen Arnett all the credit in the world for not divulging what his final letter said. Outstanding debut novel.

Different, unsettling, and...funny? Mostly Dead Things is a remarkable first novel -- I'm anxious to see what Arnett does next.

I had a hard time staying interested in this book and started skipping around when I was about half way through. I felt like the heart of the story could have been told with less flashbacks and more of a focus on the actual marriage while they were living it.

A strange and beautiful tale of darkness, mourning, and love. And also taxidermy. Delightfully quirky and absolutely worth your time.

This is a book that, after reading the blurb, I really wanted to love; however, I didn’t. It was fine. It was funny at times. It was strange. I’m good with strange, but there was something about this book that just didn’t resonate with me.
Partly, I think, I just didn’t love the main character, Jessa, until nearly the end of the book. I found her character tedious at times and I just wanted to shake her. I couldn’t get into the strange relationship that both her and her brother had with Brynn. I also didn’t like how Milo, her brother, was basically a non-existent parent. That didn’t sit well at all. It had been something like 14 years since Brynn left and still Jessa and Milo couldn’t get themselves together.
The book also dragged, especially in the middle, but it did pick up at the end. Maybe this book is more of an exploration of an idea than a strong story.
I did love Jessa’s mother, though. She was fantastic. I loved how she rearranged the taxidermied animals in “artistic” ways and how she used her art to come to terms with her life and marriage. She was the only one with any life in her, and maybe that was the point.
Other people seem to love this book, however, so maybe it is more of a case of this book just not being for me.
Thank you to Netgalley and Tin House Books for a review copy.

This was a great read! I started the book thinking I knew what was going to happen, but Arnett added twists and turns that kept me engaged the whole time. I particularly enjoyed her use of taxidermy and the family business as a way of demonstrating the loss and changes that Jessa and her family go through following the suicide of her father. The book dealt incredibly with the ways in which life simultaneously goes on with potential and also seems to have ended completely in the wake of the death of a loved one.

What I liked about Arnett’s novel was the depth brought to her characters that muddied the line between identifying the right or wrongness of choices. Set within a sticky, nostalgic Florida, Mostly Dead Things is a study of the way people who are existing with grief simultaneously conflict with each other; one character deals with grief by forefronting the memories of loved ones who abandoned them above the presence of those who stayed; another uses art to unearth the ugliness of a spouse who’s passed away. The clashing of these perceptions ultimately result in characters confronting the ways in which their beliefs mirror or fail to hold up to truth.

Instead of concealing flaws for the sake of creating personas that the reader aspires to identify with, Arnett sets their weaknesses center stage. Characters become vulnerable to the reader and each other, creating a narrative that is consistently unwinding time and memory to allow relationships to heal. Mostly Dead Things is a deeply vivid novel that is unrelentingly honest and optimistic in its uncertainty.

Amazing, odd book that doesn’t rely on oddity (in this case taxidermy) to get into the characters‘ heads and their relationships with each other. The metaphor of skins (or carapaces) for emotional layers is perfect.

There are books that you read, and there are books that you sense, vivid and visceral, getting into your every pore. You watch the story unfold, and humidity sticks the hair to the back of your neck, and the taste of cold coffee coats your tongue, and your nose fills with the smells of stagnant water and old garbage and stale sweat. Stories you feel like a bruise, that cling to your skin long after you finish the plot, like the memory of the lip gloss of the first girl you ever kissed.

Mostly Dead Things is a book like that.

Kristen Arnett’s debut novel opens with an animal autopsy as a way of introducing a suicide, and only gets darker and weirder from there. It focuses on the Morton family taxidermy shop through the eyes of daughter Jessa-Lynn, the heir to her late father’s business and talent. In the wake of her father’s sudden suicide, Jessa tries to take on the role he left behind, managing the business and stepping up to support what’s left of her family, which is falling apart at the seams.

Her mother channels her grief into hypersexualized art using the shop’s taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo drifts, showing up only occasionally for Jessa, their mother, and his children. Milo’s daughter Lolee and stepson Bastien run rampant, wild and flirting with danger in the way that only young people in pain can be.

Loss hangs through the entire book, as thick and permeating as the Florida humidity that Arnett describes with the loving familiarity of a local. There’s the loss of the Morton patriarch, yes, but just as cutting is the absence of Brynn, Milo’s wife and Jessa’s best friend--and what? Lover is too simple a word--and Lolee and Bastien’s mother, who walked out on the family years before. As the story unfolds, the threads of Brynn’s loss and Prentice’s weave together, and we see how interconnected pain can be.

One of the most incredible aspects of this novel was how very brilliantly it portrayed the ways we can appear to function while we simultaneously fall apart. Arnett doesn’t gloss over how very unpretty this process of self-destruction can be. She doesn’t write HBO-style depression, slim and manicured and sexy: this is room-temperature beer drunk at three in the afternoon and eight in the morning, too-strong coffee with the grounds stuck in your teeth, flies buzzing around the trash built up in your kitchen, the smell of rotten fruit and spoiled takeout in your fridge. Depression is never named, but Jessa’s stagnant lack of care for her body, her home, anything but getting through her day and keeping her business afloat is so vivid and visceral it nearly jumps off the page.

Mostly Dead Things has been called “a love letter to Florida” and “an eccentric look at loss and love,” and it’s both, in so many ways. It’s sexual and intimate, sensual but not sexy--the sex scenes are sticky and wet, tinged with the strawberry lip gloss of first kisses and prickling anxiety of breathing in the expensive perfume of a woman you know is out of your league, and there is never a sense of titillation. The queerness of the book simply is, infused into the text right there with the grief and the heat and the beer and the trips to 7/11 for bottomless coffee.

This book made me laugh, made me cringe, made me wince, made me sweat, made me cry. It made my heart ache, and made me feel deeply seen in a way that I haven’t in a long, long time. Jessa’s experience is a million miles from mine, but I felt close to her, and when the story ended, I almost felt like I was losing a friend. And to my total surprise, despite the strange, dark humor that permeated every inch of the story (and I could write a whole other blog post on just the humor, god, this book is so grossly funny in all the worst ways, it’s delightful), I ended it feeling…optimistic. Like things might somehow work out.

Mostly Dead Things left me feeling bruised, exhausted, shockingly hopeful, and absolutely immersed in cravings for beer, grease, and a trip to somewhere swampy and warm. It’s a 2019 must-read.

Honestly, I gave up at 37%. While I really enjoyed Arnett's writing style, I found the story itself sluggish and - for a book at least partly about the widow of a taxidermist making erotic art out of his creations - surprisingly boring.

What a quirky book! It definitely has its fair share of twists and turns and I never knew what might happen next. It is a deeply grounded and human book. Grounded in people, humanity, and mistakes. It seems that “strange” and “weird” are the words used most often to describe this book and it is that but it is much more about real mistakes, reckonings and how a trade or daily practice can settle and sustain and give order to a life.
Jessa has so much to deal with but I felt that she was such a wonderful grounded character through all of it. You get the dynamic of her relationships, with her brother, her mother, and her brother's wife.
I wasn't sure I was going to like this book but I really did