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Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Kristen's Arnett's debut novel follows Jessa-Lynn Morton, a woman tasked with taking over her family's crumbling taxidermy business after her father's suicide. Jessa-Lynn's grief and anger manifest in binge drinking and spending most of her time alone, cutting up and sewing back together dead animals in the very shop where her father ended his life. Her brother Milo becomes withdrawn and distant and her normally subdued mother Libby begins experimenting with increasingly bizarre pornographic art installations made from the family's taxidermied animals. The Mortons' compounding sense of loss is amplified further by the departure of Brynn, Jessa-Lynn's best friend, lover, and sister-in-law who left the family for "someplace even hotter than Florida with a stranger she'd met at the dry cleaner."

Mostly Dead Things could easily turn into a caricature of Florida life, but Arnett treats each of the Mortons as full, complicated people instead of simply a collection of quirks. Through Jessa-Lynn's cool, steady narration — the act of taxidermy transforms from a grotesquery into an act of preservation and the sad irony of the story lies in Jessa-Lynn's inability to give herself the care and empathy she extends to the dead animals that she guts and mounts on her taxidermy table.

At times the story's pacing fumbles as flashbacks blur with the present and Lucinda Rex, a magnetic gallery owner who champions Libby's art, feels like an underdeveloped romantic interest in comparison to the main cast of characters. But on the whole, Mostly Dead Things is a strange, loving, and often startlingly funny portrait of loss and the act of piecing together the scraps of what's left in grief's wake. Get your copy now. – Jillian Karande