I have really been enjoying novels in verse lately, and this one was no different. It's so beautifully told with a gorgeous examination of grief that I found relatable and poignant. I greatly appreciated this book and look forward to more from the author.

I found this to be a beautiful novel about death and grief and the importance of loved ones and taxidermy (which I find fascinating). It is written in verse instead of your traditional novel format. This really is a touching and lovely book.

The Art of Taxidermy is a prose novel set in Australia, somewhere around the 1960s (I'm guessing, but our 11-year-old protagonist's father fought in WWII). It is the story of a girl who has faced an absolute onslaught of trauma in her short life, and the ways in which she copes.

I find it hard to critique this book because it is a prose novel. I've seen criticisms that there wasn't enough plot to keep a reader interested, and while I'll admit that there isn't too terribly much that happens, this didn't bother me for two reasons. 1) This book is very short, and I read it in about an hour. Because there are just so many fewer words on a page, there don't have to be as many plot points as one might expect in a typical novel. I had no trouble remaining interested in the story. I was never bored. 2) This book really isn't a plot-y book, if that makes sense. The Art of Taxidermy is an exploration of grief and one girl's journey through it. The vast majority of the story is just examining Lottie's psyche rather than describing things that happen to her.

Despite being about a young girl, this book is extremely dark and definitely somewhat macabre. Lottie's response to the death she has been forced to deal with is to become somewhat obsessed with it. At the beginning of the book, she is just collecting carcasses she finds while wandering, but this evolves into an interest in taxidermy, as the title might suggest. While Lottie never kills anything, there are fairly graphic descriptions of dead animals and her amateur attempts at taxidermy which might bother some readers.

There are very few other characters in The Art of Taxidermy besides Lottie, but I felt that this meant that they all felt necessary and all received a decent amount of characterization and backstory, which is somewhat surprising for a book so short (it is 240 pages long, but the entire book is made up of free verse poetry, so in the end it feels much, much shorter). I felt so much for Lottie's father, and her sister and grandmother were really interesting characters. Lottie befriends an Aboriginal boy, Jeffrey, who, although he receives less time than I expected, provides a much-needed escape for Lottie and brief moments of levity in an otherwise very sad book. (Sidebar, but I really enjoyed the tidbits of the book about WWII in Australia and on the indigenous peoples just from an educational standpoint) The only character I felt could have been done a little better was Lottie's Aunt Hilda, who is ultimately a caricature of traditional values and whose value is in acting as an obstacle for Lottie's unorthodox interest in taxidermy.

In the end, though, The Art of Taxidermy was made of beautiful poetry that left me feeling distinctly melancholic, but with just the right amount of hopefulness/optimism at the end to keep the book from being too much of a downer. I recommend this book for anyone who, like me, is looking for a quick read on a rainy day.

I’m torn on this one, it was good and the premise so interesting, but the book dragged quite a lot and was almost boring at times.

Hello, this review will go up on my blog, instagram, and goodreads on August 12,2019. I will also add to Amazon and Barnes & Noble (if applicable) on the publication date. I will add links to reviews when they are live.


Title: The Art of Taxidermy
Author: Sharon Kernot
Genre: YA Fiction/Poetry
Publication Date: August 23rd, 2019
Rating: 3 stars

eARC provided by publisher through NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

->Click for Synopsis<-

The Art of Taxidermy is a verse novel about love and death, and the beauty that comes with it. Lottie takes us through her struggle of losing her mother and finding an outlet through taxidermy.

When I requested this book I guess I missed the part where it said verse novel but I am glad that I requested it because it turned out to be a wonderful surprise! 

The author's lyrical writing sweeps you into the fascination that Lottie has when it comes to taxidermy. Each piece has its own unique topic that come together with the rest. Taxidermy is an unusual topic and this verse novel does a great job of making it even more interesting and combining it with beautiful writing.

Overall, it was a good book to get me out of my comfort zone. If you are into verse novels with a wonderfully intriguing theme then this book is for you!

At the age of eleven
I fell in love
with death.

Lottie is 11 years old, and she has already experienced too much grief for a girl her age. Her mother is gone, dead, and her father cannot bring himself to clean out her room, leaving it as a shrine to the woman he loved instead. Opa is gone too. And still, Lottie has no friends except for a girl named Annie.

At least Annie is always with her if no one else wants to be around her.

One day, Lottie and Annie discover a dying bird, and Lottie takes it home, keeping the beautiful creature so it could live on even if it is no longer truly alive. This goes well for a while, until Aunt Hilda steps in as a mothering figure that no one asked for - taking the things that Lottie loves and throwing them into the incinerator because 'they aren't fit for a young girl'.

But how else is she supposed to deal with her grief if everything she loves just keeps getting taken away from her?

The revival and
re-creation of something
that has expired
is an honour
and a gift

There is something oddly fascinating with all things morbid, and I think that Sharon Kernot did an astounding job of turning something bizarre, such as taxidermy, into something beautiful. Lottie's story is no different. Understanding her story is like understanding our own - at the heart of it all, grief can either overwhelm us or we can overpower it. Lottie's ways may not be conventional, but they make her feel alive, even if she's not 'normal'.

I also loved the fact we got to touch on a lot of Australian history in this book. I am American, and in traditional American fashion, I only know about America's views of all the major wars (thanks history class!). It was so interesting to see how Germans were treated in Australia during the WWII/Hitler time period. And even more interesting was learning about the aboriginal people in Australia - honestly, a group that does not get highlighted enough to those who do not live in Australia.

This is a quick and easy read, but a worthwhile read all the same. If you are a fan of prose, you are going to be a fan of this!

The Art of Taxidermy has a lot going for it: beautiful writing, excellent crafting, and a look at grief that is nothing short of raw. Lottie's mother has passed, and Lottie has taken up an interest in science and death; specifically, she is captivated by dead animals and taxidermy. Her father indulges her, appreciates her scientific mind, and it's entirely possible that it's an interest she would have taken up with or without the grief she's experienced, but something about the obsessive nature of her thoughts leads me to think there's an implication of something fractured in the way she views the world without her mother in it.

There's also a bit of chat about indigenous people, with a side character, Lottie's friend, being an Aboriginal boy. I didn't actually realize this book was set in Australia at first, and I've never read a book featuring an Aboriginal character, so I really appreciated that as an addition.

The drawback to the entire book, though, and what made it impossible for me to give this more than 3.5 stars, is that I was bored. It sounds like the sort of story that should be innately interesting if only due to its gruesome nature (and it is gruesome, friends! Steer clear of this one if you're bothered by descriptions of dead animals), yet honestly, so little happens, and what does happen feels repetitive and somehow shallow. These are sad topics, yet I found it nearly impossible to feel anything about them, and I think that may be because Lottie is unfazed by anything that doesn't involve taxidermy.

This will be a great book for a lot of people, but sadly, I wasn't one of them.

Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

a touching verse novel about grief and taxidermy; I received a copy via Netgalley and finished it an hour later. lovely descriptive writing that gave me a newfound appreciation for taxidermy