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Summary
Summary
What does it take to come back to life? For Jessa-Lynn Morton, the question is not an abstract one. In the wake of her father's suicide, Jessa has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the taxidermy shop to make provocative animal art, while her brother, Milo, withdraws. And Brynn, Milo's wife--and the only person Jessa's ever been in love with--walks out without a word. It's not until the Mortons reach a tipping point that a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities and second chances. But will they be enough to salvage this family, to help them find their way back to one another? Kristen Arnett's breakout bestseller is a darkly funny family portrait; a peculiar, bighearted look at love and loss and the ways we live through them together.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Arnett's dark and original debut, Jessa discovers her father dead of a suicide in the family's Florida taxidermy shop. She also finds a note asking her to take care of the failing business, her mother, and her brother, Milo. Additionally, Jessa mourns the loss of Brynn, her brother's (now) ex-wife and Jessa's longtime lover, who left both her and Milo years before. As Jessa grieves over her lost loved ones, she must also deal with her remaining ones: Milo sinks from the world, missing work and barely paying attention to his children, and Jessa's mother enters a late creative period, using the stuffed and mounted animals from the shop to make elaborate sexual tableaus for a local art gallery. Jessa also begins a romantic relationship with Lucinda, the director of the gallery and benefactor for Jessa's mother's newfound (and, for Jessa, "perverted") artistry. Set in a richly rendered Florida and filled with delightfully wry prose and bracing honesty, Arnett's novel introduces a keenly skillful author with imagination and insight to spare. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A young woman struggles to take the reins of her father's failing taxidermy shop after his suicide.Jessa-Lynn Morton only feels comfortable when she's scraping out the guts of a dead baby raccoon with delicate precision or drinking to forget the girl who got away. When her beloved father unexpectedly commits suicide, Jessa must carry the weight of her broken family on her own. "My father molded me to assist him; to be the one who helped shoulder the load," Jessa recalls. In the wake of his death, it doesn't take long before everything unravels. Jessa's mother starts placing stuffed and mounted animals in flagrante delicto in the shop window as well as "a parade of animals decked out in lingerie and posed in front of boudoir mirrors, alligator skulls with panties stuffed in their open mouths and dangling from their teeth." Meanwhile, Jessa's brother, Milo, sleeps through shifts at the local car dealership; Brynn, Jessa's first love and Milo's wife, is nowhere to be found; and the couple's children suffer from inattention and abandonment. Things begin to shift when Lucinda, an ambitious gallery owner, takes note of the strange, sexual displays in the taxidermy shop window, forcing Jessa to confront her childish anger about her mother's artwork as well as her chronic fear of intimacy with other women. Arnett's debut switchbacks through time, slowly skinning the pelt of Jessa's formative obsession with Brynn and her tragic relationship with her father, forged over preserving animals scraped off deserted Central Florida highways. Arnett writes in clear, perceptive prose, tracing Jessa's struggles growing up queer in the Deep South, yet the pacing and climax of this deeply psychological novel remain off-kilter. Jessa is stuck playing the eternal, repressed "straight" man to her creator's wry sense of humorwith mixed results. For all of Arnett's insights, the outsize mother-daughter conflict at the heart of the book feels as if a bear skin were draped over the skeleton of a much smaller mammal. Still, there's much to admire in Arnett's vision of Florida as a creative swamp of well-meaning misfits and in the sweet hopefulness of finding your way back to yourself through family.An ambitious debut writer with extraordinary promise, Arnett brings all of Florida's strangeness to life through the lens of a family snowed under with grief. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Jessa-Lynn Morton grew up and stayed put in central Florida, learning taxidermy from her father and then keeping his shop afloat after he commits suicide. She drinks too much and helps raise her niece and nephew after their mother, Jessa's sister-in-law and also, inconveniently, the love of her life, abandons them. Her mother makes obscene art using animals Jessa has preserved. Making a list of what's quirky about this debut novel from Arnett, author of the story collection Felt in the Jaw (2017), is too tempting to resist, but these quirks also serve as the novel's starting points. Arnett's writing cuts through all the unusualness and renders Jessa human and relatable. Jessa lives in a world of pain with little clue how to cope, and Arnett doesn't sugarcoat her or her Florida home. Both are described in unapologetically unvarnished terms: sour-smelling armpits, popped-zit gore on mirrors, garbage, rot, and roadkill. The novel alternates its storytelling between before Jessa's love abandoned the family and after. Florida animal species structure the before chapters, and their taxidermy is described in detail. The squeamish may struggle to read about Jessa's life, but readers who persevere will be both compelled and rewarded.--Emily Dziuban Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE NICKEL BOYS, by Colson Whitehead. (Doubleday, $24.95.) Whitehead, a Pulitzer winner for "The Underground Railroad," continues to explore America's racist legacy in this powerful novel about a serious student who dreams that college might lead him out of the Jim Crow South. Instead, he's wrongly arrested and sent to a brutal reform school modeled on a real institution. MY PARENTS: An Introduction/THIS DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU, by Aleksandar Hemon. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) In a two-part memoir, Hemon shows how Bosnia and its wartime strife have shaped a life of exile for his family in Canada. APPEASEMENT: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War, by Tim Bouverie. (Tim Duggan, $30.) This book about Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy in the 1930s is most valuable as an examination of the often catastrophic consequences of failing to stand up to threats to freedom, whether at home or abroad. THE CROWDED HOUR: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century, by Clay Risen. (Scribner, $30.) This fast-paced narrative traces the rise of Roosevelt into a national figure and something of a legend against the backdrop of the emergence of the United States as a world power. THE ICE AT THE END OF THE WORLD: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner. (Random House, $28.) Gertner approaches Greenland via the explorers and scientists obsessed with it, then uses the country to illuminate the evidence for climate change. GRACE WILL LEAD US HOME: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness, by Jennifer Berry Hawes. (St. Martin's, $28.99.) This magisterial account of the 2015 hate crime and its aftermath, by a Pulitzer-winning local reporter, delivers a heart-rending portrait of life for the survivors and a powerful meditation on the meaning of mercy. MOSTLY DEAD THINGS, by Kristen Arnett. (Tin House, $25.) The "red mess" that Arnett's narrator finds in the family's taxidermy workshop early in this debut novel is not the inside of a deer - it's her dad, who has committed suicide. The book balances grief with humor and lush, visceral details. LANNY, by Max Porter. (Graywolf, $24.) In this rich, cacophonous novel of English village life - equal parts fairy tale, domestic drama and fable - a mischievous boy goes missing. NOUNS & VERBS: New and Selected Poems, by Campbell McGrath. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $24.99.) McGrath, who has spent decades exploring America and its appetites, is an especially exuberant poet; his work celebrates chain restaurants, rock music and the joyful raucous stupidity of pop culture. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Library Journal Review
DEBUT A young, openly lesbian woman named Jessa is keeping the family taxidermy shop going after her father's suicide. Under her dad's tutelage, she's become a skilled taxidermist, but the shop is losing money. Worse, Jessa's mother is acting out her grief by recrafting the stuffed specimens in the shop window into pornographic tableaux. The window displays spark interest from Lucinda, a sexy art gallery owner and potential love interest, who wants to promote the provocative art. A further complication for Jessa is the loss of Brynn, the love of her life and her brother's wife, who has run off, leaving her two children behind. And this is just the first chapter. What then unfolds is a clever debut with a Florida setting that brings to mind writers such as Karen Russell and Lauren Groff. While the book deals with sad, serious things, the tone is light, if not lighthearted, but be warned: descriptions of animal kills and dismemberments are often excruciatingly detailed. VERDICT Taxidermy as a through-line may be off-putting for some, but it grabs the reader like a horror novel; it's gruesome and yet civilized, resulting in a lifelike, if kitschy, work of art.--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA