Goodreads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.84 by 45992 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Go girl!
Our titular heroine (an updated Elizabeth Bennett) is late-twenties, educated, smart, loner, who works in an indie bookstore, reads, bests all comers in trivia contests, plans each day on paper, talks to her cat, is nearly anti-social. She runs three bookclubs at the store, one for first readers 5-8 years old, readers around 10, and seniors. Then twice a week with a team whose members have learned not to intrude on her privacy, she dons a Kevin Ashmore super hero Quizzling non-descript costume on a trivia team destined to be champions of East Los Angeles.
All that is fine, until one day an unusual customer walks into the neighbourhood bookstore seeks her out. He wears a ten thousand dollar three-piece suit with a thousand dollar haircut. Yes, he is a lawyer come to tell Nina that her long lost and forgotten biological father has named her in his will.
That she had a father was news to her. Wait, that is, the biological fact of siring was not new to her because she had read about it (just kidding), but that there was a distinct individual who knew her name and was her father, so named on her birth certificate, that was (unwelcome) news to her, intruding on her carefully circumscribed world. Remember this is a person who makes a written plan for everyday and never deviates from it.
It is all a matter of indifference to her roaming, rambling, and — as usual — absent mother who liked men so much she could never marry just one.
Over the decades that father had three wives, and there are children from each as well as Nina, the resulting clan is large and spans generations. On Monday morning there was just Nina and the cat in her life, and on Monday afternoon came along half-a-dozen siblings, grand parents, more aunts, and a slew of nieces and nephews by blood and law. Whew! What’s more they are riven by carefully nurtured grievances against each other. There is enough malice to go around and around to incorporate Nina whose G&Ts disappeared apace that night, while Phil, the cat, watched in brooding and silent disapproval.
I liked the set-up in the bookstore with its crew, and the quiz league, but they receded quickly into the background. Though Nina spends all her time reading we never quite know what she is reading with such intensity or what she gets out of it.
Following the Chick Lit convention there are about a hundred pages of misunderstandings between boy-girl which is resolved in a flash in the last few pages. Predictable, and also forced. And most of that miscommunication is played out in dialogue that goes on and on, and on. It looks like a wannabe film script.
Really?
Really.
Really!
(See what I mean?)
Moreover, the wedding on picnic blankets complete with a supernumerary camel followed by a food fight at the bookstore are just too much. The deceased father is partly redeemed, but not the ever-absent mother. I did like the motor mechanic’s patient effort to teach Nina to drive a stick-shift.