The Nature of Things

Some of the reviews that I read of this book described it as a comic novel. Those reviewers must have read a different book than I did.  Admittedly there are some moments of black humor but mostly this is a story about a grieving family that is unable to reach out to each other and communicate their need for understanding and love. These are some seriously mixed up folks in the mold of characters that we've come to expect in novels set in Florida. This one is set in Central Florida and is Kristen Arnett's first novel. It features a family of taxidermists who are tortured by a couple of tragedies from which they seem to be unable to recover and move on. We meet the family through Arnett's narrator, Jessa-Lynn Morton. Jessa-Lynn is the child of a taxidermist. She has a younger brother, Milo, but Jessa-Lynn is the one who is close to her father and wants to follow in his footsteps. Her happiest times are those she spends at his side learning the art of taxidermy, along with th...