Blurb
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. . .
My review
From the schedule page for April 30th, which begins Nina Hill’s story, we learn that: she has got or looks after a cat, she’s set herself a lot of healthy goals and is pleased with herself for these, example: she’s having a smoothie for breakfast and has drawn a smiley face alongside. She’s also put three exclamation marks alongside her goal to drink more water. Is Nina someone with early health plans whose willpower is challenged? Certainly, allowing herself a Subway for lunch suggests a shaky start to any diet. Although, she plans to make up for it by doing a spin class before a trivia quiz. It may be that she hasn’t updated her schedule because spin is crossed out on the left of the schedule but not the right. Additionally, she either can’t spell or the book’s editors have used a different version of English from UK English in the spelling of smoothy vs smoothie.
This schedule is a great way to begin a book and immediately tells the reader so much about the character and setting for the book but in a way where the reader does the work without being told – a true collaboration.
Set in Los Angeles (so, American English – she can spell!), Nina Hill works in Knights, a small indie bookstore which opened eighty years previously and is hanging onto its tenancy by its toenails. A lot of information comes across quickly through this schedule page and because readers are naturally curious the author has realised that the planner details mentioned above won’t have been lost on us.
The story is written engagingly and I wanted to know more about Nina from that schedule: what had prompted the health regime and that it’s seemingly doomed to failure before the morning is over. Immediately I discovered Nina worked in a bookshop I was fully engaged. The style comes across as a little Bridget Jones because the omniscient POV and current tense are directed at the reader. Nina’s upbringing is unusual to say the least. Her mother became pregnant and decided she wanted the child but not the man. Nina and her mother spent all of her early childhood together, until she became too mobile for her mother to continue working as a professional photographer. At this point her mother handed her care over to nanny Louise. From then onwards Nina only saw her mum three to four times a year. It’s clear that her mother loves her very much but it sounds as if she, like Nina, has ADHD and finds it difficult to settle.
The story trips along delightfully. Nina is part of a quiz team whose rivals: You’re a Quizzard Harry are fronted by the annoyingly good-looking and enigmatic Tom. Alongside Nina and Tom being left together by his matchmaking teammate, Liz, Nina is contacted by a lawyer who tells her that the father she’s never known has died and left her something in his will. Sounds as if the story is plain sailing and tied up neatly? Fortunately, author Abbi has a few spanners up her sleeve and she’s not afraid to throw them into the works. The Bookish Life of Nina Hill is refreshing good fun and tackles difficult subject matter in a way that is totally believable. I thoroughly enjoyed this story and I hope you will too.
About the Author
Abbi Waxman was born in England in 1970, the oldest child of two copywriters who never should have been together in the first place. Once her father ran off to buy cigarettes and never came back, her mother began a successful career writing crime fiction. Naturally lazy and disinclined to dress up, Abbi went into advertising, working as a copywriter and then a creative director at various advertising agencies in London and New York. Eventually she quit advertising, had three kids and started writing books, mostly in order to get a moment’s peace.
Abbi lives in Los Angeles with her husband, three kids, three dogs, three cats, a gecko, a snake, five pigeons, four chickens, and two guinea pigs. Every one of these additions made sense at the time, it’s only in retrospect that it seems foolhardy.
Write on the Cusp 