I couldn't help but think as i was reading this "This is what men think femininity looks like". A single lens focused on the physical and reproductive aspects of the feminine mystique. It's really feminine to suffocate a spouse under your own weight while their having sex. ( )

Full disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from Net Galley.

This collection of short stories about women and their breasts wants to have it both ways. It aspires to be both a very French, very male appreciation of topless women in all their variations and a thoughtful exploration of the feminine soul.

Doing that combination well would be a tall order for just about any writer, and this book isn’t really up to the task. Instead, it’s too self-serious to be smutty and too shallow to be insightful.

The art is pretty decent, though. I would probably be willing to read another book drawn by Pont, but his writing just isn’t up to to the task.

These stories are uniformly slight and wan, and the overall impression is almost entirely superficial. Which is, perhaps, unsurprising for a book of stories about women’s breasts written by a man. ( )

I really wanted to like Fragments of Femininity a lot more but other than decent drawings from Olivier Pont I felt let down.

I can certainly appreciate minimalist stories (I am speaking strictly of the narratives here, not the art) and, when done well, they can create as much or more impact than a story that shows every single emotion. But even a minimalist story needs something to hold it together, usually character, maybe scene or action, just something for the reader to then fill in the space around. The characters were supposed to be the glue but each one was largely a caricature being put through a scenario to elicit a response from the reader. I did, in a couple of the stories, find enough individuality in the character to care more than the base level we all care about people. But the story did little to help me fill in the spaces. I tried and even created some interesting back stories of my own, but these were not from what the story either offered or withheld but rather from my desperate attempt to find more to care about.

I think the ideas behind the book and the stories was interesting but perhaps Pont would have done well to get someone else to write the copy and stick to the drawings for his contribution.

I would refrain from making any recommendation to someone about this book. I think there will be people who will both appreciate the book more than I did and connect with the women better than I did, but I have no idea who those people might be.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )