#BookReview: THE BOOKISH LIFE OF NINA HILL by Abbi Waxman @amplecat

Publication: 9th July 2019 – Headline Review

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…

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THE BOOKISH LIFE OF NINA HILL is such an entertaining read. I spent an entire afternoon with my nose in this novel and I loved every single page. In Nina Hill I found a kindred spirit. Like her, I prefer books to people and I often find socializing exhausting. Also, I admired and envied Nina’s organizational skills. Nina is relatable, interesting, and engaging, and very very likable. Actually, I loved all the characters in the novel, I enjoyed all the literary and pop culture references that fill the pages and, for some reason, I found very interesting the random encyclopaedic facts that Nina casually dropped in conversations.

Nina Hill lives in Los Angeles with a grumpy cat and she fills her days with her job in a bookstore and many book clubs and trivia quizzes. Being around people give her anxiety and she is comfortable only when she is around books. She has her days completely planned out and she doesn’t like the unexpected. So when she finds out that the father she never met has died and she has a whole family of brothers, sisters, stepmothers, nephews/nieces, and grandnephews/grandnieces, her anxiety level rises up. Add an adorable trivia rival and possible love interest, and suddenly Nina’s life is far from ordinary.

I love Abbi Waxman’s novels. Her stories are heart-warming, funny, and engrossing and her characters are endearing and realistic. THE BOOKISH LIFE OF NINA HILL is decisively my favourite and I was happy to see characters from her previous novel make a few appearances (hopefully I will read more about Nina in the author’s future novels). I loved the author’s distinctive writing-style, the way she inserts herself in the novel and in the characters’ lives.

THE BOOKISH LIFE OF NINA HILL is one of these books where I fall in love with the character and I don’t want the story to ever end. A must-read!!!

A huge thank you to Headline and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of the novel.