Title: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill
Author: Abbi Waxman
Publication Date: July 9, 2019
Publisher: Berkley
Format: NetGalley eARC

Sooo … I have an unpopular opinion, which is pretty much the only sort of opinion I have lately. Surprise!

Are you shocked? You should pretend to be shocked. I’ll even throw confetti.

I requested The Bookish Life of Nina Hill because so many people I knew seemed to have loved it, and I heard so much hype and positive reviews about it. I didn’t know it was chick lit. That’s my bad. I should have paid attention, but you know what? That takes a lot of effort, and something has about 2 seconds to register before my ADHD brain sidles off to something else.

I don’t read chick lit. Ever. I used to, from time to time, but I have almost unanimously not enjoyed them as much as they deserve to be enjoyed. So now I just tend to avoid the genre. Obviously this is going to impact my thoughts about this book.

Hence why it’s an unpopular opinion. I will say, though, that I did enjoy it, which was a bit of a surprise once I realized it was chick lit (which was early on, since it’s pretty obvious). It was a nice evening read for when I wanted to turn my brain off and just enjoy something.

The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is about a bookworm, like so many of us, who just wants to go through life loving her cat, reading all the books, and avoiding interaction with other humans as much as possible. Is that so wrong?

Apparently so, because life is sort of thrust upon her in the form of a dead dad and a whole family she didn’t know existed. Surprise! I can kind of see why she’s not a big fan of surprises now. At its core, it’s a light read about a bookworm who discovers another side of herself she didn’t know existed.

❧ The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is just a fun, quick, light-hearted read that you don’t have to think too hard about. The writing is light and conversational and speeds right by.

I picked the book up, and by the time I looked again, I was 15% through it in no time. How often does that happen? With me, not very. Is this the magic of chick lit?! The tone is breezy and conversational, written in third person, with enough tangents to feel very stream-of-consciousness and chatty, like a friend recounting a story to you. It makes for a great weekend read or afternoon read.

The banter is also just really fun. Realistic? Not particularly. But fun. A lot of Nina’s thoughts are charming and cute and the sort of random asides that my ADHD brain can totally relate to. I’ve probably had these thoughts at least once or twice in my life, and it was fun to see that I wasn’t alone. Nina’s just as weird as I am. I’m sure Nina should probably be concerned about that.

❧ Nina is a character that’s easy for bookworms to fall in love with because, let’s face it, she’s largely an amalgamation of all the things a bookworm claims to be.

And humans are predisposed to enjoy reading about themselves, it seems. It’s always special when you can recognize some part of you in a character, and for many people, that makes the connection so much stronger. It’s a book about a bookworm for bookworms, and if that’s not perfect marketing, I don’t know what is.

From her love of all things bookish to her slight awkwardness, being an introvert, her pop culture references, and just her general snark and wit, Nina tends to be a highly relatable character.

There’s a little of something for everyone to take away from her personality, even if it doesn’t 100% fit you.

❧ Nina suffers from anxiety, and oh how relatable that is.

There were definitely situations that I found myself nodding my head and laughing, because I’ve been there, done that. Because it’s good to laugh at yourself. You know, when you’re not having an anxiety attack, obviously. I could especially relate to the saying something and then kicking yourself as soon as the words are out of your mouth. Oh, good times.

As with everything, anxiety is a spectrum and different for everyone, and there were things Nina did, despite her anxiety, that left me scratching my head. Like the worse her anxiety gets during confrontations, the angrier and more outspoken she gets. What sort of superpower is this?! I just sort of slither away to stew in a corner if I get super stressed in highly charged situations. Teach me your ways!

❧ The Reynolds family is a delight—in that crazy, chaotic sort of way.

They all have personality. Sometimes that’s a bad thing. You know, when that personality is either multiple or slightly out of touch with reality. But it’s hecka fun to read when they all get together. Pretty sure this is a family I’d like to be a part of, so if Nina wants nothing to do with this, I’d be more than happy to be unofficially adopted, please and thanks.

❧ The book is very character driven, with basically no plot to speak of. Whether this is good or bad depends on personal preference.

For me, I really need some sort of a plot, even if it’s character driven. I’m thinking of things like My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman, which is very character driven with a similar plot to this (relative dies and through their will, you find out more about them and learn about family, basically). Except in Backman’s book, there’s an underlying plot. Everything Elsa discovers is leading toward a certain ending.

This isn’t the case for Nina, and this book ends up being more of just a character study about her life. Her very plain, very relatable, very average life. I’ve got more than enough of that in my own life, thanks.

That’s not to say there weren’t fun or interesting moments, but there was nothing particularly remarkable or memorable for me, personally, because I need that underlying plot or I go a bit wonky. If that’s not as much of a concern for you, I can easily see you loving this.

❧ The trivia team names are so freaking cute and I love it.

I mean, this has so little bearing on the story, and yet it brought me immense joy. We’ve got such adorably bookish teams as You’re A Quizzard, Harry; Book ‘Em, Danno; Menace to Sobriety; Tequila Mockingbird; Spanish In-quiz-ition; Olivia Neutron Bomb; and Quizzly Bears.

❧ There is no short supply of characters packed with personality and wittiness and sarcasm, and oh how I relate to that.

Not to say that all the characters were the same, because of course there was nuance. But they all delivered some pretty awesome one-liners and quips at times, which I thought was just fun. It added to the levity, and even during the times I didn’t relate to Nina, there were plenty of other characters I could relate to.

❧ Despite being highly relatable in many aspects, Nina is an obvious stereotype of what a bookworm is “supposed” to be.

Which I suppose is how she’s so relatable to all bookworms everywhere, because, as I said, she’s a little of everything all rolled into one. But when you add it all up, in the end, I was a bit frustrated at just how cardboard cut-out bookworm she ended up being, without anything really unique or redeemable to differentiate her character.

So let’s play Bookworm Bingo for a minute. If you have these boxes, check them off:

✿ Has a cat she talks to and pretends talks back
✿ Socially awkward and shy
✿ Painfully introverted
✿ Schedules her time and hates to deviate from it
✿ Averse to adventure or outdoorsiness or new things
✿ Finds people annoying and taxing
✿ Judges others based on whether they read and what they read
✿ Inserts her favorite books and movies into every aspect of her life
✿ Has severe, sometimes crippling, anxiety
✿ Is a fount of random knowledge and trivia
✿ Is horrified that someone would watch the movies and not read the books
✿ Consumes a less-than-healthy amount of wine
✿ Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, perfectly organized by author and publication date
✿ Collects books and has trouble getting rid of any of them

❧ There were little things that made me twitchy, which taken as single things may not seem like a big deal, but when you add them all together, it really impacted my enjoyment of the book.

And this is 100% on me and not the book, of course, but as this is my review, I’m going to complain about them, so neener neener. It’s also entirely possible that these are just common tropes in chick lit, and therefore, my complaints are silly and invalid. This is probably the case. Still not gonna stop me, though.

Warning here that some of these may be slightly spoilerish. I try to talk in generics, but there are some specific instances mentioned that happen early in the book. Just throwing this up here so that if you don’t want those early scenes potentially spoiled, just read the bolded words.

✿ Randomly capitalizing words: Ugh, this is such a pet peeve of mine! I don’t mind it happening occasionally, but this was everywhere in this book. It’s not “let’s do it this way instead,” but, “let’s do it This Way Instead.”

✿ Children sound like mini-adults: I’ve spent a lot of my life around children, and I’ve met maybe five that are as bookish and smart and intelligent about the world around them as the ones in this book are supposed to be. Apparently, they all live in LA now and go to this one book store. Are children in LA different from the ones we have on the East Coast? Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised. But they felt inconsistent. A six-year-old who can rattle off an impressive list of random facts on decomposition and bacteria with Nina, but then doesn’t know that writers get to make things up for a living. Eh? Ten-year-olds who Nina observes as being shy and slightly awkward in the romance department then turning around and criticizing her flirting. It was just too much for me to believe.

✿ Too many inconsistencies: We’re told X about Nina, but in the story, we’re shown Y. She’s introverted and has severe anxiety and doesn’t handle change or surprises. Yet, she finds out about her family and handles it graciously. She seems to have no trouble interacting with anyone other than Tom and puts herself in situations to meet new people all the time without an issue. She stresses the need for a strict schedule that shouldn’t be deviated from, to the point where she tells herself there’s no time to take a call from a lawyer because it’s not in her schedule, but this comes right after a chapter where she spontaneously offers to help someone she only knows in passing without scheduling it and that doesn’t seem to be an issue.

✿ Everything is compared to a book or a movie: Look, I love books and movies as much as the next person. Obviously. I mean, look where we are! But even I don’t live my life by comparing everything to the books I’ve read or the movies I’ve watched and relating it to that. In the end, it just got exhausting trying to keep up with all the references, and I sometimes got frustrated with the sheer number of them.

✿ There’s a lot of randomness and diversions, and the story seems to get derailed often in favor of a soliloquy about some normal, boring aspect of life: This is coming from someone with ADHD, who is a veritable master of randomness, diversion, and sililoquys, okay? But I don’t need three pages about what Nina’s morning routine would be in an ideal world versus what it is now. She’s just not that interesting. I also don’t need five or more pages of her making her goal board and wondering about Bullet Journals and inventing a whole backstory for them. Nina’s thoughts are cute, but they felt like a distraction from the story more than anything.

✿ I couldn’t stop myself from constantly thinking, that’s not how genetics work. All the early family members Nina meets have red hair. You know, because their father/grandfather did. Despite them all having different mothers and majority different gene pools. I know this is a common trope in a lot of places, but I hate it with a passion because the odds are just so freaking unlikely, but it’s raised as “of course we’re related! We have red hair!” There were also a lot of personality traits where that happened, as well, where character A likes doing XYZ just like character B, so obviously it’s just in their blood. If this was maybe a one-time thing mentioned in passing as a cute bonding moment, that’d be fine, but it was basically in everything. Every time the characters had something in common, it was, “See? Of course we’re related.” That’s just not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

❧ This romance is a bit … yikes!

I have very specific criteria for romances I love. It doesn’t always have to involve knives and stabbing and the threat of homicide (though, that’s a plus). But I need some sort of chemistry, something that convinces me these two obviously belong together. I just didn’t get that here.

Tom is oddly obsessed with how small Nina is, which is … weird? Is this a normal thing? To the point where his brother says to tell him about her and Tom says she works in a bookstore and is small. Those are the first two things out of his mouth. And then it’s repeated a second time, leading into a discussion of how small she is.

Nina is very concerned that Tom isn’t bookish enough. He hasn’t read any of the classics. *gasp* The only thing they have in common is Harry Potter, which is her last-ditch grasp at them actually having a book in common. Essentially, their shared enjoyment of Harry Potter is her throwing him a rope. But he’s hot, so … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I felt absolutely no chemistry between these characters, and the entire romance just felt like work to me, like a constant struggle to make their opposing worlds match.

Honestly, I was sort of rooting for them to decide to be friends. But I knew that obviously wasn’t going to happen.

❧ Nina is such an everywoman bookworm that it’s easy to see yourself in her, which can be a good thing for many people. For me, having been in similar situations to Nina and reacted totally differently, it was a negative, because it made it that much harder to separate myself from the character.

I’m not Nina, and therefore, we handle things differently and make different decisions, yeah? Common sense. But Nina is such an everywoman character, meant to capture the hearts of bookworms everywhere (and based on other reviews, she succeeds!) that the divide became a little blurred. And let me tell you, I did not react to the news of having siblings I didn’t know nearly as well as she did.

Nina and I have several things in common: I also know very little about my biological father. I was about 16 when I learned he had other children and, thus, I have half-siblings. It was awkward. It was weird. No, I have never met them, and I have no desire to. If I did, though, would I hit it off with them right away? No. Because we come from very different worlds and very different life experiences.

Nina also struck me as a horrible snob who was extremely judgmental. And I like to think I’m better than that, okay?

Whether I am or not is a matter of opinion, I suppose. I couldn’t care less about what people read, though. You don’t have to be bookish to be my friend. You don’t have to read all the same things I do to date me. People who don’t read aren’t less than or defunct or broken in some way. I read and thoroughly enjoy books and can’t imagine a life without them, but they aren’t the foundational pillar of my life. They aren’t required to be inserted into everything I do. The fact that if you took books out of the equation, Nina ceases to exist sort of irritated me.

Also, because she was such an everywoman, whenever we disagreed on issues, it felt that much jarring to me and pulled me out of the story.

This wouldn’t have been such an issue if she felt more like her own character and less like me. Or, you know, a potential reader insert. Thus, when she did things like say reading Harry Potter doesn’t really make you bookish, just able to read, or when she questions whether philosophy should even be in a books/literature trivia category (I love philosophy, man), it really threw me for loop.

❧ The ending was a bit too neat and tidy and wrapped with a bow.

I mean, I knew, obviously, from the very first, that this was going to have a nice happy ending, and you know what? It’s nice to read those once in a while. I enjoyed that aspect. But it was a little too happy, to the point where it felt rushed.

Basically, in the last 5% of the book, all the conflicts that developed in the rest of it were solved one after another and they all lived happily ever after.

There was no real development behind these. They just happened. Surprise! Nina blames it on her newfound spontaneity, except that she’s never shown it in any part of the book except for the last 5%, so it felt more like a cop-out to me than a well-deserved conclusion.

What are your favorite books about books? Or your favorite bookish characters?