This was a fast, entertaining read about an unattractive social misfit's brief, hopeless relationship with an unattractive, self-centered social misfit. The author kept her distance from the heart and soul of the characters, so that they were written without depth in a cartoon character style but were too pitiful to be truly funny and not warm and real enough to be truly tragic, just people you might pass on the street and hardly notice. The book was more character than plot or action-driven and that was a problem since the flat characterizations lacked enough warm blood to make them really gripping. However, if the characters were any more real, the book would have been so heart-breaking that it would have lost its entertainment value. This slice-of-slipping-down-life book seemed like it was a slice of nothing about nobody interesting and yet it left me feeling kind of empty and really sad as if I ended up really caring about Edie and Drum's pitiful lives.