A New York Times Bestseller "This book is my song of the summer." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at Esquire, The Week, BuzzFeed, NYLON, Bustle, HuffPost, The Boston Globe, and more. One morning, Jessa-Lynn ...

Where to begin with Mostly Dead Things? The book was universally panned by NUBClub. We literally had nothing good to say about it. The main issue was with the characters. Jessa was simply unlikeable, Brynn was unbelievable, and we could not find sympathy for any other character in the book, as Arnett seemed to bend over backwards to make them as gross, anti-social, unethical, and repulsive as possible. We chalked a lot of this up to a classist bias in the book against poverty, that led Arnett to constantly present everyone as dirty, sloppy, and disorganized, which is perhaps the laziest and most offense stereotype of the poor that exists. All of the characters act with deeply disturbing ethics, whether it's Brynn's disgusting manipulations of Milo and Jessa, Jessa's nonchalance about her nephew wanton theft and murder of animals, or the ridiculous insurance fraud fire that the supposedly sophisticated art-dealer/love interest commits. The plot essentially makes no sense. Jessa's mom starts making suggestive art with taxidermy, but the descriptions of the art sound crude and tame, and in a 21st century, post-Maplethrope art world, we have no idea why they could ever be seen as interesting or provocative. The relationships fared no better. Why was Brynn so beloved by everyone, when she was basically a jerk constantly? Why is anyone attracted to Jessa, when she both is described as filthy and sullen all the time and basically considers herself worthless? Why is there a fire at the gallery -- in fact, how is there a gallery at all? No one from Gainsville at NUBClub (because we have members who have lived there) could even imagine how this world could exist in that town. And it all ties up in a stupid and unearned bow when Jessa and her mom basically have one conversation to clear the air after months of outright hostility and defamation and then the moral is that they start an experimental taxidermy gallery together. This plot would make a terrible rom-com or Hallmark movie, but at least those would have moral characters that you liked following. And stylistically...well, I could never a read another description of bad coffee again in my life (we get one in every chapter) and there was nothing that even resembled humor in the book. We spend the last third of our discussion simply reading reviews of the book in newspapers (looking at you, Parul Sehgal) and wondering what book with the same title they read, because it could not be what we consumed. There is humor you like and humor you don't get. We understand that. But we could not even find something that RESEMBLED humor in this book, unless maybe it was that we were supposed to laugh at how pathetic the queer hillbilles were, and that is not a viewpoint we could adopt. It's just a classist, cheap, poorly written piece of trash that makes no sense at all. Arnett should take a tip from the taxidermy she researched and realize to make some dead looks appealing, you have to give it a resemblance to life and some sense of wonder. This book has neither.