Reviews - Shortcomings | The StoryGraph

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494 reviews for:

Shortcomings

Adrian Tomine

3.46 AVERAGE

tcdancer4u's review against another edition

3.0

emotional tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

kchiappone's review against another edition

4.0

Quick, enjoyable, miserable read. I'd be interested to read more.

nssutton's review against another edition

3.0

This is supposed to be a review of Warm Bodies.

You see, I packed a copy of that with me on my trip to Catskills. I also packed a copy of Ready Player One because I was worried that Hurricane Irene was going to be as bad as they said it would in my neighborhood. I left my house on Thursday, with all sorts of preparations in place to prepare for the worst. My car was in a lot, four levels above ground. One air conditioner out, the other resealed, windows taped, important items moved away from potential leaky spots. And then I left for higher ground, a previously scheduled trip to the Catskills, like we had been recommended to do.

There wasn't a lot of time to read during the first night of the trip, nor the following day. It wasn't a relaxing trip, but a raging annual party, laced with tension that I couldn't shake. I was worried about my family, living on equally low ground and staying put for the storm. I was worried about not having cell service, about not having internet, about having no idea what was going on anywhere else in the world. Here and there I'd try to grab a few pages, trying to become engaged with this first-person zombie narrative. I left it on the breakfast table and another friend perused it. We shrugged. It had to be compelling, but I wasn't compelled.

But then Sunday came, and Hurricane Irene was unexpectedly flooding the Catskills, and we were in our cars and on the road, and past the waterfall we had seen the day before, that was now raging rapids on a road we had all taken to come to the vacation rental and now we were retracing our steps to reconvene at gas stations to figure out alternate routes to come back to this waterfall that was now raging rapids to... well... You've heard the news by now and seen how hard that section was hit. We took a gamble and were very, very fortunate. We spent the night at a friend's parents' house, leaving the next morning after a local dam burst there, and returned to our neighborhood later the following afternoon to find it... clean. No downed trees, no fallen power lines, no pools of standing water to meet us. Everything just looked clean.

I came home, still shaken by the things we had seen, and tried to figure out what to do with myself. I didn't have any groceries because I wanted to wait until after the storm, but I wasn't up to it. I ordered Chinese food that took forever to arrive and poked and prodded at Warm Bodies. It was awful. So when dinner finally arrived, I picked up this Tomine book from the stack. I'd read it before and don't remember what I thought of it. Honestly, re-reading it the second time, I don't know what I thought of it. I just knew that his illustrations were familiar and it didn't require more of me than I was able to give it during this reading. That's not a fair assessment of this book, but neither would saying I took it purely because it was the exact opposite of a zombie-thriller set in a post apocalyptic world after I had just gotten a taste for what such a world might look like.