July 9th 2019 | Berkley
Source: Library
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.Why I had the bookish life of Nina Hill on my TVR for a very long time, It wasn’t a book that I was running to read. In all honesty, I should’ve read this book a lot sooner than I did. Even though I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to, the bookish life of nina Hill was such a fun read.
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.
While I expected this book to be a romance, I found that it was women’s fiction. By the time I came to the last pages of the story I found that I hadn’t minded not knowing it was women’s fiction. I really loved nina as a character, I really enjoyed the plot, and the entire reading experience was really positive for the most part. In terms of the plot I really love the family dynamics that we have. It’s unconventional and messy and I was very nervous about how it would be handled. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the new members of nina’s family were actually really nice people. While not all of them were as nice to her as I had hoped they would be and allow her some space to deal with this new revelation, others were incredibly kind and welcoming. I thought that it was really well done in terms of showing how family dynamics aren’t all the same all across the board.
Nina herself as a character was one that I really enjoyed reading about. She and I aren’t very similar but there were certain aspects of her personality I really connected to. She’s someone that loves to have a planner and the inserts of planner pages between the chapters was such a fun look into who she is as a person. Seeing how these pages changed over the course of the story really gave me an idea of how she was interacting with the events. I also appreciate that she doesn’t go through an immense character change by the end of the story. A lot of the time women’s fiction books tend to have their characters go through a 180 personality change that seems forced and unnecessary. Nina, on the other hand, is able to get out of her shell and welcome members of her family into her life. But she’s still a woman who is used to being on her own and has a lot of anxiety in social situations. Even by the end of the book, where she has more family than ever before and a romance, she is still struggling with her anxiety. I really appreciated the look into how anxiety manifests for Nina and how she goes about handling those situations.
And while we’re on the topic of how she handles her anxiety, I want to take a moment to talk about the romance. Again, this is not a romance but women’s fiction so I knew that the focus would be on romance. At the end of the day, I enjoyed the rest of the story so much that I was completely OK with not focusing on the romance. As much as I wanted to love this romance, on the other hand, near the end of the novel I really hate how Tom acted towards Nina. Nina suffers from anxiety and occasionally has panic attacks. She’s had them enough in her life which she knows exactly how she needs to handle them and a lot of the time that means handling them alone. I personally felt that there was a moment where Tom did not respect Nina‘s wishes. This led to Tom getting upset with nina and essentially ghosting her. I didn’t appreciate this at all because I felt like nina handled the situation very well. I hated that nina was made to feel like the person in the wrong and she had to be the one to go after Tom. At the end of the day, if your significant other cannot understand that they need to honor your requests, I don’t know if I can get behind that relationship.
Aside from that, the bookish life of Nina Hill ended up being a really great read. I read the entire book in a day because I really wanted to know what else happened with Nina and her new found family. I think that this book is a really great look at loneliness and how that can manifest differently in people. I also really enjoyed that Nina's family doesn’t consist of just adults. It was a great look at how children can handle incredibly complicated situations very well. In some ways, children adapt a lot easier to these situations than parents do. Overall, I would highly recommend the book of life of Nina Hill with some caveats to the romance.
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