The Bookish Life of Nina Hill by Abbi Waxman is an easy reading adult lit novel.
Nina is perfectly content with her life. She has her job, her hobbies, her planner and most importantly, her books. Nina’s life is structure and mostly unchanging and this is just the way she likes it; more importantly, this is the way her anxiety likes it. Work, home, the occasional book club or trivia night… perfect.
That is until she finds out she has a dad, who died and left her something in his will, along with a plethora of crazy brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and probably a few other thrown in for good measure. As an only child with literally no family and, more importantly, no real urge to have family, Nina’s head is about to explode. What’s worse is that her trivia night crush Tom, likes her too! What’s a girl to do?
Ug, this book. As with all guilty pleasure reads, I sped through this one at top speed. But the cliches and overdone sarcasm killed me. It almost felt like the author tried to inject as much wit as she possibly could, realism be damned. I kept thinking about the banter between Rory and Lorelei from Gilmore Girls but overdone. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed and knew many of the references and quips but one does not need to hear about “dick pics” for ten straight minutes.
I also felt that the story wasn’t really believable, although there were parts I liked. I enjoyed Nina’s getting to know parts of her new-found family and totally believed the competitive nature of trivia night. But California stereotypes felt way overdone and, not being a Californian myself, I kept getting snagged on them.
Again, this was a guilty pleasure read. Nothing stellar but something light that you know is going to end well. This one gets 2 stars from me.
That’s all for now!
-M-
Commentaires