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3.87 AVERAGE
3.87 AVERAGE
A lovely novel in verse. It lacks focus at times, and I think would be even stronger with tightening, but was an enjoyable read.
I came for the taxidermy, not knowing what else to expect. What I found was a simple story that laid bare the fragility, the fine line between life and death, an expression what it is to see beauty of life within death, and an aspect of Australian history that westerners might not always learn about. This is a book that I will return to to understand myself and my feelings, and one that I will recommend to the people I hold dearest.
A beautiful and dark compilation of poems that tells a story of a girl who knows exactly what she wants to be despite people's opinions of her.
Death has always been a part of life, and has been used as themes in literature through many different angles. Sometimes from the point of view of the mourners (e.g. EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE), sometimes from the dead (e.g. THE LOVELY BONES), even from the grim reaper’s point of view (e.g. THE BOOK THIEF). Never before did I read a book where the mourning relative of a dead person mourns through taxidermy, an art form I always found bizarre and somewhat related to cruelty toward animals.
Until I read this book.
THE ART OF TAXIDERMY is a verse novel written from the point of view of a preteen girl, Lottie, whose poignant narrative shows us how she copes with the many losses and deaths in her life, and how they shape her life.
I must confess something here. I am also a writer. My writing journey began as a way to cope with deaths in my family. In December 2013, I began to write, after struggling with death and mourning and grief and loss got almost two years. I put to words a story circling in my head and before I knew it, it became my most intense and passionate dream.
I began to write to cope with death, the way Lottie did. Here, I connected so strongly with her, I cannot express in words. Lottie, at a tender age, lost her sister, Annie, in a tragic accident, and then lost her Mother and her unborn/stillborn little sister as well. To cope with death and loss, Lottie began to find corpses of dead animals in the forest around her suburbia. To preserve the dead animals, she learnt to do amateur taxidermy. She could not resurrect her mother and sister. They were long gone. But she grieved through this.
Her passion was not well received by her aunt Hilda, who took over the household after Lottie’s father retreated to his study to cope with many more deaths in his life; of his own father, his twin brother, his wife and two of his children. Like Lottie, he didn’t let go of his deceased loved ones. Rather he clung to them. From him, Lottie received minor antagonism. Through him and Lottie and Lottie’s grandmother, Oma, and Aunt Hilda, the author shows us different ways of grieving and mourning for loss.
Alongside this, the author also sketched beautifully how racism plays its role in post WWII Australia. German Lottie and her dark skinned aboriginal friend, Jeffrey are isolated and alienated from the rest of the mainly white Australian school. For those who naïvely believe Australia has no racism should pick up and educate themselves through this book.
Overall, I’d recommend this beautiful and poignant coming of age verse novel about death and grieving and learning to live and love again after significant losses in life. Through taxidermy, the author shows us the dead might never come back alive, but the mummy of their memories will always be preserved among us, through the art of taxidermy, aka our love for them.
Until I read this book.
THE ART OF TAXIDERMY is a verse novel written from the point of view of a preteen girl, Lottie, whose poignant narrative shows us how she copes with the many losses and deaths in her life, and how they shape her life.
I must confess something here. I am also a writer. My writing journey began as a way to cope with deaths in my family. In December 2013, I began to write, after struggling with death and mourning and grief and loss got almost two years. I put to words a story circling in my head and before I knew it, it became my most intense and passionate dream.
I began to write to cope with death, the way Lottie did. Here, I connected so strongly with her, I cannot express in words. Lottie, at a tender age, lost her sister, Annie, in a tragic accident, and then lost her Mother and her unborn/stillborn little sister as well. To cope with death and loss, Lottie began to find corpses of dead animals in the forest around her suburbia. To preserve the dead animals, she learnt to do amateur taxidermy. She could not resurrect her mother and sister. They were long gone. But she grieved through this.
Her passion was not well received by her aunt Hilda, who took over the household after Lottie’s father retreated to his study to cope with many more deaths in his life; of his own father, his twin brother, his wife and two of his children. Like Lottie, he didn’t let go of his deceased loved ones. Rather he clung to them. From him, Lottie received minor antagonism. Through him and Lottie and Lottie’s grandmother, Oma, and Aunt Hilda, the author shows us different ways of grieving and mourning for loss.
Alongside this, the author also sketched beautifully how racism plays its role in post WWII Australia. German Lottie and her dark skinned aboriginal friend, Jeffrey are isolated and alienated from the rest of the mainly white Australian school. For those who naïvely believe Australia has no racism should pick up and educate themselves through this book.
Overall, I’d recommend this beautiful and poignant coming of age verse novel about death and grieving and learning to live and love again after significant losses in life. Through taxidermy, the author shows us the dead might never come back alive, but the mummy of their memories will always be preserved among us, through the art of taxidermy, aka our love for them.
Many thanks to Text Publishing for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review
I briefly started this one a while back but it didn't strike my fancy as I generally don't prefer novels in verse. That said, I think that readers who tend to enjoy novels in this format will really enjoy this one!
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I briefly started this one a while back but it didn't strike my fancy as I generally don't prefer novels in verse. That said, I think that readers who tend to enjoy novels in this format will really enjoy this one!
| Goodreads | Blog | Pinterest | LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram
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.
ARC provided via NetGalley.
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.
ARC provided via NetGalley.
3.5 stars. This was an interesting novel-in-verse that explores grief and healing through the lens of taxidermy. It also touches on German internment in Australia and the Stolen Generation. While I didn’t connect with the poetry/writing as much as I wanted to, it was a beautiful read.
This was NOT the kind of poetry book I was expecting BUT I love what it is.
This book had everything from; Australian/world history, grief, childhood trauma, coping, individualism, and a whole lot of death.
Not to mention some bits that just make you giggle; "I found the sheet, she said... You are now a young lady. A woman..."- ahhh yes, she totally isn't a budding taxidermist.
Such a brilliantly put together piece.
This book had everything from; Australian/world history, grief, childhood trauma, coping, individualism, and a whole lot of death.
Not to mention some bits that just make you giggle; "I found the sheet, she said... You are now a young lady. A woman..."- ahhh yes, she totally isn't a budding taxidermist.
Such a brilliantly put together piece.
emotional
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes