Ratings72
Average rating3.7
*The hilarious new novel from Abbi Waxman - I WAS TOLD IT WOULD GET EASIER - is available now* Abbi Waxman's charming novel follows introvert and bookworm Nina Hill as she discovers if real life can ever live up to fiction... Shortlisted for the Comedy Women In Print Prize, this novel is perfect for fans of Lucy Diamond and Maria Semple. 'GORGEOUS' Marian Keyes 'Like a big slab of your favourite cake in book form' Libby Page, author of The Lido Meet Nina Hill: A young woman supremely confident in her own. . . shell. Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, an excellent trivia team 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. So when the father she never knew existed dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! She'll have to Speak. To. Strangers. And if that wasn't enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny and interested in getting to know her... It's time for Nina to turn her own fresh page, and find out if real life can ever live up to fiction. . . Praise for The Bookish Life of Nina Hill... 'Like a conversation with the funniest person you know - just lovely' KATIE FFORDE 'Charmed by its funny loveliness' NINA STIBBE, AUTHOR OF REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL 'Book lovers will absolutely relate' O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE 'Meet our bookish millennial heroine - a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet' THE WASHINGTON POST 'A quirky, eccentric romance that will charm any bookworm' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY 'I hope you're in the mood to be downright delighted, because that's the state you'll find yourself in' POPSUGAR
Featured Series
2 primary booksThe Bookish Life of Nina Hill is a 2-book series with 2 primary works first released in 2019 with contributions by Abbi Waxman.
Reviews with the most likes.
“Oh my God, she thought, it's hard to be human sometimes, with the pressure to be civilized lying only very thinly over the brain of a nervous little mammal.”Well this was an odd book. With pretentious characters who learned how to feel and behave from aliens.
Was I supposed to find Nina charming? Because she felt kind of awful to me. It was a painful experience to be in this character's head. She felt like a manic pixie dream girl, the book-nerd suffering with anxiety version. All her traits were screaming: “Aren't I so relatable: introvert, book-lover, sufferer from anxiety, adjacent to a broken home? “But all I could think of was how rude and abrasive she was, from beginning to end. Having a mental condition doesn't give one a pass to be terrible all the time.
Let's take a random example:
“Peter Reynolds, your fabulous gay nephew, and how bizarre is that?” Nina shook his hand, grinning back. She'd always enjoyed the company of gay men, and finding out she was related to one was honestly a bit of a bonus. “I'm Nina, your single heterosexual aunt, which doesn't seem possible.Who thinks like that? Gay men are not an accessory.
She wasn't the only horrible one. At one point her friends makes fun that they need to drink for the kids in Africa and Tom's brother joking a certain family traints is better than a cleft palate. Making fun of people with a genetic disability, so funny, ha ha. I don't know what the author was thinking by writing these kinds of jokes.
“Let's do these shots,” said Carter. “There are sober children in Africa who'd kill for these. We can't waste them.”“I agree. But seeing as you met Rachel and decided to marry her in the space of, like, a month, we're all scrambling to keep up.” “I guess instant attraction is a family failing.” “Better than a cleft palate.” These are just some of unsavory dialogues taking place in this book. They were meant to be witty and funny but I could not find it remotely humorous.
The plot was mostly underwhelming and dragged out. Just like the romance element. She was terrible to Tom most of the time and he kept coming back for more because...she was attractive and small (almost like he had a fetish)? And they had nothing in common. She thought he was a dumb jock who was hot.
And talk about the mother of all clichés, the bookshop she works at is having financial problems and the father she never met just happened to be rich and left her a hefty inheritance following his death. Someone has been watching too many Hallmark movies.
Imagine all the most annoying parts of the internet. People who make their entire personality out of liking one thing. People who care as much about owning books as they do reading them. Kitschy planners that are only for aesthetics. People defending gentrification, making a lot of broad ill-informed references to Africa, precocious children, and people only referring to gay men as ‘fabulous.' Put all those things together, and you have The Bookish Life of Nina Hill! This book takes place in an aggressively white version of Los Angeles and features a character with all of the quirky features of mental health disorders, but none of the downsides (unless you count her daintily fainting from a panic attack).
Past the author trying to fit in every heavily-marketed introvert trope, there's not much to this book. A poorly developed relationship where two people are attracted to each other and then fall in love after like 2 stilted conversations, a confusing lack of understanding that trivia isn't genetic, and people adopting the word family very quickly. The story was easy-going enough that I didn't hate it, but I certainly didn't like it.
I loved this book. You might not like this book if you don't love to read. Fortunately, the target market for this book are readers, which is convenient, because if the target market was non-readers there might be a problem.
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