Thank you to She Writes Press and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader's Copy!

Available August 4th 2020

From the sultry slow swing of New Orleans to the hustling streets of New York City, Corie Adjimi creates a series of short stories unlike any other. Focusing on the female psyche, Adjimi captures the light and humorous as well as the deeply philosophica. The women in these stories come from all backgrounds and storylines and Adjimi coordinates the dance between them. I enjoyed reading this collection!

I like sets of interconnected short stories. These stories were connected by character and over time. Each story had a tinge of sadness or regret, which I appreciated.

Thank you to the author, She Writes Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This collection of short stories centers on one woman, Callie, who is introduced in the first few stories - her present-day, her childhood, her family and friends. The later stories branch out into being about people in her extended family or circle of acquaintace, and it is not always easy to work out where the intersection/connection is. There is no plot development to speak of, as the stories are episodic, giving the reader individual slices of life. I liked the fact that the storytelling was very honest and unvarnished, but overall the tenor was quite bleak. The writing is beautifully balanced and draws you in.

I really enjoyed Life and Other Shortcomings. It really shows the types of expectations women are faced with throughout life. Each chapter brought new insight on how women are critiqued unfairly on how their bodies change from pregnancy, how they are as wives/ mothers and how they age. It also touched on how women are often ignored or brushed off in the medical field and even by family/ friends when experiencing chronic pain and disease. Every chapter was well done. It was a solid read and I loved the writing.

Interconnected short stories involving an entertaining cast of characters. The main protagonist is engaging, and I did enjoy this collection. Insightful as well as engaging writing. Recommended.

Reading these interwoven stories felt like peeking into the private lives of these women. Corie Adjmi wrote what is in so many women’s hearts and minds that it felt more like reading a friend’s inner thoughts and less like short stories. These are the kinds of stories that, even a week after finishing, stay in your brain and keep churning out connections.

Life and Other Shortcomings by Corie Adjimi is a bit of an uneven collection of short stories. At first I thought they are interconnected but that seemed to be less of a thing as I read on.

A book of short stories different women different countries.Each story so well written characters and locations come alive.A group of short stories each one involving drew me in .#netgalley#shewritespress.

Much as one would expect from a book published by She Writes press this short story collection is about the female experience. Though it is by all accounts good enough to elevate itself above the dreaded women literature genre trappings. It starts like this…in 1998 a well to do married woman named Callie sits in a restaurant with her spouse and two other couples, they are all close friends, so much so they’ve got a name for themselves, The Sixers. And yet the general conversation is fairly insipid and Callie’s interaction with her dearly beloved is based almost strictly on slight slights he lobbies at her throughout, from the ever so subtle Are you going to eat that? meaning breadstick to other comments. And Callie takes it like a trooper. Because she justifies it to herself, because David is a great looking man and a good breadwinner and a father of their three kids. And then we travel back in time to find out how Callie got to have that sort of mentality and check out her life as a kid, her family, her friends, etc. And then the stories start branching out more, so much so that the connection to Callie remains barely tangential at times. But all of them concentrate on female experience and almost always Jewish experience too. Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of the structure of this collection. It seems that the author might have had a Callie themed novel in her (and maybe additionally a bunch of random short stories too), but it got weirdly dispersed into this form. Possibly because novel needs more of a set three arc structure, more plot drivers and so on and these stories are almost consistently more along the lines of slices of life. Scenes from a movie that don’t add up to a movie. More like Polaroids from different eras. I mean, it works as is, but none of this is very plot driven, it’s mostly episodic. The main attraction here is the plain sturdy realistic sort of narrative that presents many aspects of womanhood in a very honest and thus, of course, not very appealing way. I mean, if an alien spy was choosing a gender for the form he was to take to live among the earthlings and he read this book, he would certainly go with testicles all the way. So yeah, this is a book certain to find an audience among people who like women fiction that isn’t so tediously Lifetimeish. For me, it was just ok or slightly above that. Watching a recent Neftlix feature on feminism was way more poignant, but whatever form the message takes, it’s good, because it’s so very overdue. Thanks Netgalley.

This was a book of short stories of different women. I liked that each story makes you feel a certain type of way and that they took place in different parts of the world.