by Kristen Arnett
4.3 · 4 reviewsA grieving daughter, the family taxidermy shop, and all the dead things she can't quite let go of — sharp, queer, and gloriously Floridian.
Jessa-Lynn Morton has spent her whole life learning to preserve dead animals in her father's Central Florida taxidermy shop. When she finds him gone by his own hand one morning, she inherits not just the failing business but the job of holding a fracturing family together — a mother who begins crafting lurid, defiant art from the mounted specimens, and a brother whose own marriage has already come apart.
What follows is a wry, unsentimental portrait of a woman trying to keep everything intact while quietly falling apart herself. There's the long-buried matter of Brynn, the woman Jessa loved who married her brother and then vanished, and the steady ache of wanting things she's never been able to name out loud. Set against the strip malls, swamp heat, and roadside oddity of Florida, this is a story about the messy work of grief and the people who refuse to leave you alone with it.
Kristen Arnett writes about loss with a taxidermist's eye: clinical, tender, and unafraid of the grotesque. By turns funny and devastating, it's a debut about queerness, family, and the strange art of trying to make the dead look alive.
First published in 2019.
4 reviews
Arnett can clearly write, and some passages are stunning. I just wanted a bit more forward motion — it lingers in the same emotional register for long stretches. Worth it for the mood, less so if you want plot.
The mother's art project alone is worth the price of admission. Dark, tender, and genuinely original. I've never read anything quite like it and I keep recommending it to people who say they're tired of the same old family novels.
The atmosphere is the star here — humid, weird, lonely, alive. The grief is handled with a lot of care and the queer storyline hit me hard. Lost a little momentum in the middle but the ending earned its weight.
I did not expect a book set in a taxidermy shop to wreck me this much. Jessa-Lynn felt so real I kept forgetting she wasn't someone I knew. Arnett finds humor in the worst moments without ever being cruel about it.