Title: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
Author: Abbi Waxman
Year published: 2019
Category: Adult fiction
Pages: 352 pages
Rating: 4 out of 5
Location: (my 2021 Google Reading map): USA (CA)
Summary: Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own...shell.
The only child of a single mother, Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, a kick-butt trivia team, a world-class planner and a cat named Phil. If she sometimes suspects there might be more to life than reading, she just shrugs and picks up a new book.
When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! They're all—or mostly all—excited to meet her! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers. It's a disaster! And as if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny, and deeply interested in getting to know her. Doesn't he realize what a terrible idea that is?
Nina considers her options.
1. Completely change her name and appearance. (Too drastic, plus she likes her hair.)
2. Flee to a deserted island. (Hard pass, see: coffee).
3. Hide in a corner of her apartment and rock back and forth. (Already doing it.)
It's time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she isn't convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It's going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page.
Review: Between a good TV show and jury duty, I was quite distracted when I read this book so I ended up reading it in chunks. I am not sure if that's why I feel like there isn't really a strong plot or if that's just how the book is. That's not completely true; Nina does meet her new family and there is drama involved (because, of course there is, it's a new/unknown family!) and she does have the trivia team romance. But, I couldn't really see where these things were going and I think that's due to my distracted reading.
I like Nina. She is fun and so into books and reading that a reader of this novel thrills on almost every page with the references to authors, famous plots, and books most of us have read. I think that might be difficult for someone who hasn't read a lot. But for me, this totally worked.
I also loved the trivia nights and wish I had something like that in my life. And the names of the trivia teams are so much fun (Nina's is called Book 'Em, Danno).
This is a fun read that I wish I had read in fewer sittings.
Challenges for which these count: none.
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