The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

“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.