Getting to know Nina brings lessons for us all
Happy New Year, dear readers, and what better way to start the new year than to read Abbi Waxman’s “The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.”
This novel can be read on so many levels, and most of them are often laugh out loud funny.
Nina Hill is 29 years old, single, a college graduate, a resident of Southern California and a valued employee at a bookstore on the edge of collapse. She is also the daughter of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer who not only never married Nina’s father but claimed she was not sure who he was. A one-night stand was fact enough.
Nina’s mother’s profession took her around the world, and most of Nina’s parenting was in the loving care of a nanny. Books saved Nina from an otherwise isolating childhood and young adulthood.
She is most comfortable with her own company, save for a small circle of friends, books and a cat named Phil. Because of books, Nina is very good at Trivial Pursuit and is a member of a wildly successful trivia team that competes at local bars. Nina also does enjoy her wine.
The bomb drops
At about the time the reader has been given all of Nina’s strengths and foibles and we’ve laughed at some riotous female humor (men take note), the bomb drops and the pace picks up. A stranger enters the bookstore asking for Nina by name. He is an attorney who has been searching for her with news of her father’s death. The decedent not only has a name, but he also has left Nina with siblings, aunts, nieces and an assortment of ex-wives.
Because Nina is included in her wealthy father’s will, her life is immediately turned upside down. At about the same time, an ambiguous suitor has captured Nina’s unwilling heart.
Will Nina be able to open her heart to a non-bookish suitor? Can the beloved bookstore be saved? Will she welcome her new family into her tightly scheduled, well-regulated life? What is her mother now willing to admit about her birth?
Will working in the bookstore continue to play the most important role in her life? How will people compete with books? Oh, yes, and what did her father leave her in his will?
Great writing
I recommend this book because of the writing. Waxman, a resident of Los Angeles, can easily be compared to Jane Austen. Nina’s actions and those of her friends, neighbors, employer and new family is a smorgasbord of spot-on human behavior that any reader, of any age, can recognize with laughter or winces.
Waxman gives us the backstory of such behavior, which provides the novel with an unexpected and welcome depth. I loved the ending of the story. It is traditional, sensible and entirely satisfying.
Sunny Solomon is a freelance writer and head of the Clayton Book Club. Visit her website at bookinwithsunny.com for her latest recommendations to ‘talk books.’