Review by Booklist Review
Amelia is a young adult working at her mother's mortuary as the cosmetician. All day long, she makes corpses look more alive through embalming, while she feels more and more disconnected from her own body. She has meaningless sex with men she finds on dating apps, trying to get out of her head and feel something. After a tragic accident takes her mother's life, Amelia is devastated with grief, never thinking she would need to embalm someone so close to her. Finding the funeral process too much to handle, she flees to her biological father in Tasmania. But without her mother to keep her grounded, Amelia is forced to confront herself and find her own meaning with the dead and the living. In her incredible debut, Baxter combines dark humor with a complex protagonist and bold narration to both astound and devastate her readers. Amelia is a memorable heroine who is raw with grief as she struggles with and explores the paradox of finding harmony in the dichotomy of life and death.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Australian writer Baxter debuts with a raw and mordant story of a woman processing her grief, sexuality, and family relationships. Amelia Aurelia is in her late 20s and working as a cosmetic mortician at her stepfather Vincent's mortuary, where the steady stream of corpses keeps her constantly aware of mortality. She deals with this by sorting her emotions into two "boxes," one for the living and one for the dead, and copes most nights by pursuing hookups. When her mother unexpectedly dies, Amelia becomes desperate for connection. Her older brother leans on the man and woman in his throuple for comfort, while Vincent turns to the bottle. Instead of staying for the funeral, Amelia flies to Tasmania to stay with her biological father and explores BDSM with random dates. She also takes a new funeral home job and processes her grief. Baxter delicately balances the emotional heft of the situation with dark humor (Amelia, asked how she identifies while on the way to a kink club, responds, "Human woman, tired, sad, on a date with you, not wholly sure what a sadist is") and finds clever ways to push Amelia toward coming to terms with her limits. It adds up to a convincing look at a young woman's path toward self-acceptance. (Feb.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A young mortuary cosmetologist seeks a balm for her own grief in the world of BDSM. Amelia Aurelia loves her job. As the cosmetologist in the family-run Aurelia's Funeral Parlour on the Australian coast, she is part of a well-oiled machine that seeks to provide burial services for the dead and the solace of a perfect funeral experience for the living. "As I brush makeup across Jennifer's face," Amelia thinks as she attends to a young woman who has committed suicide, "I wish I could tell her…how important it is for her people to see her like this, how they need to witness this image of her at peace before they can begin to feel peace themselves." As good as she is at her job, however, Amelia knows that working so closely with grief takes an emotional toll that she seeks to address through daily, more-or-less anonymous sexual encounters with men who will "move [her] out of [her] head and into [her] body [and] fill [her] up with physical feeling to the point where emotions and thoughts [are] wrung out." In this way, Amelia has created a fragile but working equilibrium, but when her wildly affectionate mother dies in a sudden accident, all of Amelia's carefully built boundaries come tumbling down. Reeling with grief, she flees from her flamboyant stepfather, Vincent, her polyamorous brother, Simon, and her mother's best friend, the irrepressible mortuary receptionist Judy, on the day before her mother's funeral to stay with her emotionally distant biological father, Jack, at his isolated home in Tasmania. While there, Amelia falls into the BDSM scene, first as a sub taking part in an onstage pain scene, and then at the local kink club, the Widow Maker, where she begins her training as a domme. In both roles, Amelia struggles to manage her overwhelming grief as she moves through the rawest phases of her trauma and into the long, slow settling that comes after. At turns a rollicking sexual romp almost slapstick in its intensity and an existential meditation filled with the languid profundity of bodies at their final rest, this unusual novel navigates the most treacherous of emotional territories--the fault lines between love and grief, sex and death--with a deliberate lack of grace and real charm. A tragicomic debut by an impressive new voice. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
