![]() ![]() The novel pings back and forth between Jessa’s adolescence and the here-and-now, and Arnett takes her time unspooling the complications of Jessa’s relationships with her father and Brynn. We sit shoulder-to-shoulder with her anxieties, her coping mechanisms (beer, avoidance), her wry humor, her ability to turn anything into a taxidermy metaphor, and Arnett’s deftness somehow keeps that level of intimacy from becoming claustrophobic. ![]() Struggling under the weight of her father’s expectations that the family seem normal, unable to move on from her first love (her brother’s recently disappeared wife, Brynn, with whom Jessa had a protracted affair), and self-isolating to a fault, Jessa doesn’t make for an easy-breezy narrator. Adult daughter Jessa has inherited her father’s taxidermy business after his suicide, and she works overtime to keep the rest of the family afloat as they grieve, some more conventionally with others. ![]() Lucky for us then that this October has had plenty of days over 90 degrees and we can spend more time with the Morton family of Florida. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |