Adult Assembly Required

Adult Assembly Required brings us back to Nina's Hill universe and to some of its well-known characters. I remember enjoying reading Nina's book and, wanting a light reading for my Covid quarantine, this felt like a no brainer.This book follows the story of Laura, who suffered a severe and life changing car accident that makes her rethink her life choices and desires. She moves from NY to LA and, due to a fire in her apartment and an expected bad weather, ends in Nina's bookstore wet and homeless. Polly sympathizes with Laura and takes her to her house, where one room just became vacant.What I enjoyed about the book:- I loved the guesthouse and all the characters living on it. It was nice to see their interactions and I wished the book focused more on these characters than on the ones from the previous book.- Abbi tackles important issues such as anxiety, depression, domestic violence. I always like to read about characters who are struggling with these problems as they feel more relatable and, at the same time, promote awareness of this matters.- Bob was a nice guy. It is so more common to read about alpha characters that it always feels refreshing to read about nice guys. What I think it could have been done better:- I've felt the story was all over the place. There were too many important issues to be addressed and most of them ended underdeveloped. Laura had already so many issues, there was no need to add Maggie/ Sarah problems or the discussions between Asher and Sarah. Sometimes I think authors add as much drama as possible to be able to categorize the book as fiction and not romance, ending doing a disservice to the story. - Nick was an awful boyfriend; however, these types of toxic relationships are very common and leave scars and insecurities. I think this was a missed opportunity to write about an important issue, that causes insecurities and would affect future relationships. Instead of that, Laura immediately trusts Bob and this is never a root problem for Laura's inability to communicate her desires.- I consider the book would have benefit of a greater independence from Nina´s story. Not only I ended up preferring the characters of this novel, adding the previous ones let us with a too big pool of characters, most of them with no added value.- The story had inconsistencies that I didn't comprehend and that felt lazy. Laura's mom works in the psychology department studying the social behaviour of pigeons and later we are told she teaches psychology at the university. However, Laura repeatedly tells us her mother saw no value on psychotherapy and that she needed to be strong and move on. Someone with a psychology background wouldn't “struggle for weeks to find a physical cause for her constant crying and panic attacks“ . This is does not make any sense.I recommend this book to readers who really loved [b:The Bookish Life of Nina Hill 42379022 The Bookish Life of Nina Hill Abbi Waxman https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1541774944l/42379022.SY75.jpg 66042198]. If you, like me, didn't particularly liked Nina, choose something else.