Thanks to Tin House for sending me this review copy. All opinions are my own.

You don't know what love is, I thought, wanting to smack him. Love is the steady burn of acid indigestion. Love was a punch in the gut that ruptured your spleen. Love was a broken telephone that refused to dial out.

Mostly Dead Things is unlike anything I've ever read. In the best way. When people inevitably ask me what I'm reading upon seeing the beautiful cover I usually stumble around until I manage to get out something along the lines of: It's like... Florida

Mostly Dead Things is messy and painful and wholly realistic portrait of a working class family in hot muggy Florida and the eccentricities and heartbreak that comes with.

Starting with the narrow scope of our narrator, Jessa-Lynn and her rose-colored memories of her recently deceased father, slowly the family blooms into full view through vivid flashbacks. I loved this style of storytelling. I felt like I was peeling back untold layers of another family's troubled history in a way that made me privileged to have such a clear view. The writing no-doubt aided in this feeling, everything from emotions to setting being so visceral yet uncomplicated that I felt like could hop in the car and meet the characters if only I was willing to put in the miles to get there.

I'll say no more as the discovery is half the joy and what makes this story so compulsively readable. I'll definitely be picking up anything Kristin Arnett comes out with in the future.