I enjoyed this book very much for the most part. I absolutely adored the chapters told from Phoebe's point of view; they were so well written and relatable. The chapters are told from different character's points of view, and the styles and quality of writing differ with each character to better show their personalities. I think that Hawkins did a great job of going back and forth and remaining true to the characters. Personally, I didn't like May, and I agree with one reviewer's observation that she may be sociopathic more than a victim of circumstance. Still though, the book was a lot of fun, and I'm so happy to have gotten a chance to read this. Looking forward to reading more from Hawkins. ( )

This is an excellent, charming novel in which each character is convincingly written. I was intrigued from the very first pages, and was slowly drawn in deeper by each chapter. The characters reveal truths about themselves and each other in ways that are completely believable and sometimes shocking. I was so wrapped up in the story as I was finishing the book, that I was trying to read at stop lights while driving home.
I won my copy through First Reads. ( )

This was a frustrating book. There was so much potential and the writing was adept, but the book was too short to do what it seemed to be trying to do. Margaret Hawkins tells the story of a family disaster (not natural one as the title suggests) through short segments, each narrated by a different family member or neighbor, including the family dog.

There's a huge amount going on in each person's unusual life, far more than can be described in the few pages each character is given to narrate. Even the dog, Mr. Cosmo, a three-legged geriatric weimarainer, has unique talents and an out sized personality. Add into that an outrageously precocious child who wants desperately to go live with her father and wealthy grandparents, an adopted baby who doesn't speak, but who can understand everything, to the point of being able to know what her birth mother did after they were parted, a slacker artist who goes along to get along, but whose real passion is cooking and who found he loved his wife's children with all of his heart, a woman who undergoes emotional crisis after emotional crisis, a grandmother who smokes, plays cards and can nurture everyone except her daughter and a neighbor whose husband died and who has been hiding in her house ever since. That's a lot for a single novel to hold, let alone one as slim as [How to Survive a Natural Disaster], especially when the book hints and foreshadows the coming disaster relentlessly so that when it finally arrives, the paucity of description is less important than it's anti-climactic effect.

Hawkins creates wonderful characters. They seem a bit much all in one place, but each is so huge and vivid, I'm surprised that she didn't use each as the centerpiece of their own book. There are also a thousand pages worth of themes hinted at but not explored. What does it mean to be a family? What role does religion play in forming who we are and what we expect? Can a family formed from parts of other families be as strong? I can add another dozen big ideas to this easily.

In the end, this is the beginning of what could be a very good story. ( )

A middle class Midwestern family adopts a Peruvian orphan, who changes their lives in unexpected and tragic ways.
The beginning was so promising: "I didn't speak until I was seven. I didn't feel the need... Talking didn't interest me. It was what other people did and something they did so thoroughly and constantly there was nothing for me to add. ...People equate speech with intelligence but when you think about it you have to admit it doesn't always work that way."
Ms. Hawkins had my attention: May was an interesting, arresting narrator. But then the author had to go and be edgy, and keep shifting perspectives: April, shallow and shrill, an only child in her mind; Craig “I’m-the-victim-here,” the railroaded father; drama queen Roxanne, narcissistic and insecure, utterly demanding of everyone around her, but unwilling to give an inch; Phoebe, the reclusive agoraphobic neighbor; and for the Oooh-Writer’s-Workshop-Look-What-I-Did crowning touch, even the family dog. (Only I didn’t know until 2 narrators later that Mr. Cosmo was a dog: I thought he was an elderly Greek boarder who cleared out when the baby came.) The multiple perspective narration is an intriguing notion—but Ms. Hawkins doesn’t quite pull it off.
She hints at a horrible tragedy, then dances around and around it; even the revelation of the act itself is oblique to the point of coyness. And yet the precipitating event itself isn’t convincing. May’s fixation with April is only covered in four and a quarter pages—and even then, it isn’t developed or even entirely plausible: she. Is. Seven. “I was either leaving with April or killing them all.” So why shoot Roxanne and Craig, then? Why not shoot Drake and Elizabeth, since they were the ones taking April away? So May’s too young to be logical, but old enough to be obsessed and homicidal?
And Phoebe—obese, anxiety-driven, a secret drinker—she ends up as May’s guardian? The crazy dog lady gets the last word of a story that’s only tangentially hers: why?
Where? Was? The? Editor?! “Margaret, honey, you are not pulling this off. Stick to one narrator: May. Or two, if you must, say, May and April. But stop all of this too-clever-for-your-own-good stuff: it irritates the reader, and makes you leave too many holes.”
“April: I didn’t know she could read.
Craig: I didn’t know she kept a diary.
Roxanne: I didn’t know he had guns.”
Except April didn’t know May had read the diary, or that April’s entry about moving to London was what triggered (ha!) the shooting. And Craig did know that April had a diary: there had been a family meeting where both April and Roxanne accused him of reading it. So that whole exchange was strictly for effect. Get rid of excess narrators and you won’t miss mistakes like that.
Even the title seems like an afterthought: it comes from a headline Phoebe reads on the computer, and she supposedly memorizes the article’s advice—but never says what that advice is, or applies it to the situation at her neighbors’ house. And is the shooting the natural disaster, or is May the disaster? Or is May’s adoption the disastrous part, revealing the flaws in the family that were there all along? Ms. Hawkins was not clear on that score, and as a result, neither am I.

Ugh....what a downer this whole book was. I suppose it's a character study of a family that is REALLY dysfunctional and can barely be called a family. Told from multiple viewpoints (including the family's three legged pet dog), everyone is human and flawed, but so flawed that it is almost unbelievable. The whole book is very slow too, it builds up to almost nothing. Some disaster is alluded to in the beginning of the book, but once the disaster is revealed, it was also revealed to me that I didn't care about any of the characters in the book.

Overall, skip it. ( )