The sparse lyrical writing conveys so much - but leaves so much unsaid. This is both to the benefit of the book (the story and history unwinds slowly, and sometimes unexpectedly); but it does mean at times that you really want more of the 'weight' of story that would be explored perhaps in more traditional writing styles.

A lyrical and moving novel told in verse about a young girl's fascination with death as she copes with the loss of her mother.

Charlotte, or Lottie, has a passion for dead creatures as she sees their unique beauty and wants to preserve them in a collection. While her father, Wolfgang, supports his daughter's interest, her aunt Hilda is appalled and would like to see her niece into more girlish not ghoulish hobbies. I liked that this novel explored the gender roles of women at the time and how certain jobs were not socially accepted for a "proper lady."

Meanwhile, Lottie is also finding ways to come to terms with her mother's death and expresses it through the art of taxidermy. I liked the juxtaposition between the grotesque descriptions of animals to the natural beauty of wildlife. Through taxidermy, Lottie can restore beauty in a world surrounded by rot and decay. And I appreciated that this book did not romanticize death and instead portrayed death as being a natural part of life.

Exceptionally written and certainly a unique read. 9/10 would recommend.

*Thank you to NetGalley and its publishers for providing a free ARC*

The novel is written in verse
and explores love, death, grief, beauty, and the ways that people try to make sense of it all. It’s written in free verse, and it’s b e a u t i f u l. It was a slow start and took me some time to get into as it’s not a style I’m used to reading and the eBook formatting was strange, but each section is quite short and it’s broken up by illustrations like those on the cover. I do think it lacked the depth and description of an ‘actual’ novel, but I was still happy with this way of telling the story.

Representation
There’s a discussion about indigenous people and a side character – Lottie’s friend – is an Aboriginal boy. It took me a while to notice that this book was set in Australia, and I’ve never read a book featuring an Aboriginal character, so this was something I appreciated as a reader and as someone who wants to learn more.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that Lottie’s family are Germans who emigrated to Australia during World War II, and there is a lot of interesting discussion about the family history.

My one issue?
It was boring. So little happens that when something does happen it feels repetitive or forced. The book discusses a lot of sad and emotional topics, but I found it difficult to connect to them. I think this might be because Lottie seems entirely disinterested in anything that doesn’t involve taxidermy or dead animals, so it was hard to get to know her as a character and find out why I should care about her and her story.

In summary, I liked this book. The middle sections were slow and there were a few sections I wasn’t interested in as an individual, but I appreciate how this book discusses the complexity of grief.

Rating: 3.5 stars

The concept of this story is one that drew me in immediately. It’s about a young girl exploring the intricacies of life and death through the study of taxidermy, with the support of her father and much to the dismay of her late mother’s sister. And it’s told in verse! I have a weakness for verse lately, making this a quick read.

However, I found that the execution of the story was a disappointment. It felt like something was always missing, I always wanted more: I wanted to know more about Lottie and her family, I wondered why certain things were being left unexplained, I wanted to know more about Lottie’s actual studies with the stuffing of animals instead of her just staring at them. Something would be set up and then would just end.

Kernot did not provide the artistic insight to taxidermy that the title led me to hope, and often seemed to have the same tone in writing as the aunt had against Lottie, as if the reader was supposed to think she was crazy as well. My hypothesis is just that the story did not translate well to verse, as I feel the plot line itself had great bone structure.

All in all, I gave it 3 stars. It feels a little generous, but I the concept alone was enough to provide a pretty good cushion. There are some graphic scenes about dead animals and vivid death imagery in general. If this is something you can look past, it’s not a bad read.

Thanks again to NetGalley and Text Publishing Company for sending me a copy of this book!

This wonderful book is written in verse and is based around the 1980's. It's the first type of verse book that I have read, it did not disappoint.

The story focuses around Lottie, who is silently struggling with the loss of her mother, the book flits between the past and present whilst giving a glimpse at what her family were like when they were still alive.

As Lottie begins to have a fascination with Taxidermy, family members try everything to make the little girl she should be and not the girl Lottie wants to be. The writing and story telling in itself is I would say beautifully morbid, there's a love and sadness that grows within the book and the use of imagery is beautiful.

It showed how each character portrayed different stages of grief and how they deal with their own sadness and loss which was a very interesting interpretation.

Without giving too much away, I thoroughly enjoyed this book more than I thought I would and I would highly recommend. Also, can I just point out that the cover works is absolutely gorgeous, the book itself is a beautiful tale. However, if you are squeamish towards certain animal natures, then I would tell you to read lightly.

The Art of Taxidermy by Sharon Kernot is a tremendous read and I can't wait for more of her work to follow.

The book will be released in the UK by Text Publishing Company on the 23rd August 2019 and I would strongly suggest picking it up.

Overall, I really enjoyed the exploration of death and grief in this novel. The only criticism that I had was of the sudden insertion of the Nazi Germany/alternative WWII setting. It seemed to cheapen the overall message for me. I think that the narrative was strong enough without the need for this subplot. Death need not be extravagant or due to grand things like war. I liked the simplicity of death outside of that plot point. It made it more real.

It is important to know what you are getting into, before reading this book. So stating the obvious - this is a poetry book. Not easily read and not everyones cup of tea. If you enjoy "darker" more serious themes in your poetry books, this is for you. I would pass this book, but only because the theme didn't suit me.

The Art of Taxidermy is a book written in verse about death and grief. I found this very well done and engrossing. I hope to read more by this author.

Full review up at www.thebookishwiccan.wordpress.com

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a quick but captivating read. I was hooked from the first page and couldn't put it down. Bravo. Will definitely be purchasing this for my library.

A thoughtful and haunting tale told in free verse. Lottie is a young girl struggling with the loss of her mother, and her sorrow translates into a peculiar interest in death. Much to the alarm and disgust of her family, she begins to collect dead things. Luckily I missed the "poetry" label when I received this book - the unusual format might have turned me off from reading it, and that would have been such a shame. Though not my favorite device, the flowing free verse suits the material – lending it a morose, dream-like quality. The Art of Taxidermy is a surprisingly lovely and tender story of grief and the preservation of life, love, and memories. It's a quick, memorable read.

A book written in verse that is fundamentally about Taxidermy, but is also about loss and grief, about friendship and being who you want to be despite what others say or feel. This book is relatively short, but it packs lots in and still manages to be written with such vivid description of the land and the animals.
I sped through this in a couple of sittings and was really immersed. Highly recommend

This book wasn't what I was expecting. I don't tend to read alot of poetry or verse but I still like the way this book read. It was easy to read and everything in the story made sense.
The story is very dark and shows how a girl who has suffered losses and uses the art of taxidermy to make her understand them.
It's a very dark story focusing around an interesting concept.
The book had lots of lovely verses that were written beautifully.

I wouldn't say this book was bad, because it wasn't, although personally I don't think it was for me.

This is very different in writing style to the novels I usually read, but the verse style suited it well. A story of grief and death and how we handle these emotions and move forward trying to make something useful of our experiences and feelings. I enjoyed it.

Thanks to NetGalley for an ARC of this book. This one just fell short for me. It took me a while to realize that it was historical fiction (not necessarily a bad thing, since that wasn't the main point of the plot.) But the overall emotional arc of it just didn't work. This is mainly because the overall emotional arc of the book is more told than shown--Lottie spent more time talking about how taxidermy is a way of preserving/reviving life and less time showing us the grief that causes her to find joy in it.

*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Although I'm quite squeamish, I have been fascinated by the art of taxidermy and the mindset behind such an artistic medium since reading English Animals last year. This beautiful cover instantly drew me in and when I learned it was written in verse, I just had to pick it up. 

I ended up reading this in one sitting. As it is written in verse, each section is quite short and there are illustrations such as those on the cover that break up the story also.

This is quite a sad read. A lot of Lottie's experiences and interests revolve around death and there are many instances of quite grotesque animal imagery throughout. However, I didn't find that off-putting at all. I enjoyed the way that the author used Lottie's interest in taxidermy to contrast with her aunt's societal expectations of her as a woman. The discussion surrounding the concept of taxidermy and whether it is morbid or wrong in some way were fascinating. On the other hand, I felt like I would have liked a little bit more from these discussions, particularly the idea of gender and what types of jobs are "proper" for a woman to be interested in compared to a man.

Overall, I liked this book. It was a quick read that I read in one sitting and I would definitely read something else by this author again in the future. If you like novels written in verse, I would recommend you give this a go.

The Art of Taxidermy is about a girl who is fascinated by dead animals, which may be because of the past deaths of her sister and mother. While I'm not particularly a fan of books in verse, since I think they lack the depth and description of an actual novel, I was fairly pleased with this story. The Art of Taxidermy had a good message that I could get even from the few words that are in this book. I loved the fact that the main character made a career out of her interest in the deceased at the end. I also thought it was satisfying that she came to terms with the deaths of two of her family members.

The Art of Taxidermy was a quick read, but it was worth my time. In fact, this is one of the better poetry novels I've gotten through. I recommend this book to those who like books in verse-- and even those who don't.

This novella written in free verse is about a family dealing with multiple deaths; the beauty of the prose is juxtaposed to the heartache and loss of this family’s lives. The young daughter, Lottie, is twelve when we first meet her. She has no one left in her immediate family but her father, although her Aunt Hilda helps to take care of her. Lottie is obsessed with the dead creatures she finds in the Australian outback, and wants to be a taxidermist. But it is not because she is morbid; rather, she sees taxidermy as a way to bring back the dead from the edge of decay. “The revival and re-creation of something that has expired,” she maintains, “is an honour and a gift.” She imagined, she said, all the dead “coming to life with the magic of taxidermy . . .”

Moreover, she muses:

“In those delicate
bones and teeth
were the elements
and minerals
of stars and stardust
and all of the people
I ever loved.”

Her Aunt Hilda tries to steer Lottie to pursuits “more appropriate” for girls. But Lottie loves science even beyond the psychological balm that taxidermy provides her. It is an uphill struggle to convince Lottie, but at least her father, a scientist himself, eventually supports her. First, however, he has to get a handle on his own grief.

The language is often lovely and evocative, as with these passages:

“We arrived home beneath a sickle moon and faint suburban stars.”

“Her body is bent, her arms thin. Like a cubist rendition of herself, all squares, rectangles, triangles.”

Evaluation: This is a quiet little book, with its appeal sneaking up on you as you get caught up in the rhythms and images of natural life in Australia:

“Today the trees are full of flowers
and parrots.
Rainbow, musk and little lorikeets
hang from branches
like gaudy clowns,
squawking and chattering
as they strip the flowering gums . . . ”

Juxtaposed to “the bone-heavy ache of grief,” the blazing colors and warmth of the Outback that Lottie celebrates helps mitigate the darker colors of repeated loss, and lifts the mood of this gem of a book.

This is a very beautiful novel. It's a story about a young girl struggling with death and a fascination for taxidermy. The writing is very poetic and flowing, and makes for easy reading. This is a quick read, but will leave you thinking about it.

The book has pretty illustrations that add to the story. A small warning for if you have trouble with detailed descriptions of dead animals, it's not too intense in my opinion but if you're squeamish easily, this might not be a book for you.

The Art of Taxidermy is a verse novel about death, grief and how we cope with losing loved ones. After her mother's death the young protagonist Lottie tries to remedy her grief through collecting dead birds and small animals she finds by the roadside and in fields, trying to preserve them. She sees their death as beautiful, her aunt however sees her obsession as weird and unhealthy. We follow Lottie through her everyday life, watch her befriend a boy from her class (another outsider) and lose her companion Annie. There are surprising revelations and moments of deep, profound sadness in this book - a story of death and loss told through Lottie, her taxidermy and her family history (Germans who emigrated to Australia during World War II) before the bad things are eventually transformed into something beautiful. It was a pretty good read, although it felt a little underwhelming at times. The writing is poetic and almost dream-like, I'm not sure why it was written in verse though. Apart from a certain cadence to the words, I don't think the verse actually added much to the book.

Thank you to Text Publishing and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this book.

Unfortunately this book was just not for me. I loved that it was written in verse, that's very unique these days. But the story line itself just did not captivate me. Charlotte was a dull character who dealt with grief and battled against her Aunt Hilda who wished she could be a normal girl. The details were another good point in this book as they painted wonderful pictures for the readers. I do believe others will enjoy this book and I wish it luck!