The prose of Mostly Dead Things is a bed of roses trapped under barbed wire, beauty beneath a hardened exterior. How appropriate for the narrator Jessa Morton, a taxidermist who has long held back her feelings from her dysfunctional family, even before her father shot himself in the shop that Jessa now runs. It's only when her mother begins making provocative sculptures out of the store's animals that Jessa is forced to open herself up and confront her past in all its heartbreak.
Debut novelist Kristin Arnett writes with keen perception and clarity throughout, not just of grief and old wounds, but of the working-class Florida landscape in which the Mortons live. This is an exquisitely painful and tender story, compassionate and understanding of its characters and their myriad flaws, even Brynn, the woman who Jessa and her brother, Milo, both loved--until she ran from them. Like other Florida writers, Arnett takes grotesquerie as a given and mines a dark humor from her surroundings. But there's no smug mockery here either--only the capturing of a small and strange world.
Mostly Dead Things is a book of body and soul, and one of the best of the year so far. If the narrative sometimes suffers from becoming too obvious, especially in the final 50 pages, that can be easily forgiven when the writing is of such high quality. Arnett is a talented and original writer, and everybody paying attention to her work will be eagerly awaiting whatever else she has in store. --C.M. Crockford, freelance reviewer