Love and Other Natural Disasters

by Holly Shumas

I wish this book had turned out a little more like Happens Every Day. Where Gilles non-fiction might have been lacking technically, it had depth and humor and I wanted to keep reading. Shumas' novel about a woman facing emotional infidelity had the potential to be heartfelt, but fell flat.

One of the largest problems I had with Love and Other Natural Disasters was this: Holly Shumas is a psychologist. I'm assuming her work is the basis for this book. That's about what the story amounted to; a detached look at an emotional event in someone else's life.

The characters as a whole bothered me. The story was flat and dragged without a real direction. I don't feel that the characters really developed or grew. The writing was unimpressive. Basically, it was kind of a pain to read.