Abbi Waxman, the author of The Garden of Small Beginnings and Other People's Houses, is a chocolate-loving, dog-loving woman who lives in Los Angeles and lies down as much as possible. She worked in advertising for many years, which is how she learned to write fiction. She has three daughters, three dogs, two cats, six chickens, and one very patient husband. You can find Abbi at abbiwaxman.com or on Twitter @amplecat.
Meet Nina Hill: a young woman supremely confident in her own...shell. The only child of a single mother, Nina has her life just as she wants it: a job in a bookstore, a kick-butt 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. When the father Nina never knew existed suddenly dies, leaving behind innumerable sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews, Nina is horrified. They all live close by! They are all--or mostly all--excited to meet her! She will have to...Speak. To. Strangers. And as if that was not enough, Tom, her trivia nemesis, has turned out to be cute, funny, and deeply interested in getting to know her. Does he not realized what a terrible idea that is? Nina considers her options: 1. Completely change her name and appearance. (Too drastic, plus she likes her hair.) 2. Flee to a deserted island. (Hard pass, see: coffee.) 3. Hide in a corner of her apartment and rock back and forth. (Already doing it.) It is time for Nina to come out of her comfortable shell, but she is not convinced real life could ever live up to fiction. It is going to take a brand-new family, a persistent suitor, and the combined effects of ice cream and trivia to make her turn her own fresh page.
I love books with bookish narrators, because they make me feel less alone. And I'm not talking about characters that can only reference one book, or take a Shakespeare quote out of context and make it their own. I mean characters who are appropriately bookish, and well-read in at least one or two genres. It makes me feel like I'm less alone, to read characters who read just as much as I do. That's the whole reason I picked up this book in the first place. I loved Nina and her bookishness, her organization, and her confidence in her alone time. I loved how we got to see the pages of her planner. I felt like I was learning about her character not only because she thought specific things or did specific things, but because I got to see her planner. Nina was really fleshed out for me, because we get these really specific and grounded moments from her childhood, and also a deep look at how her anxiety affects her life. It's almost surprising how well we get to see Nina, especially when I remember that the book was in third-person. There was no distance between Nina and the narrator at all--we got all the deep parts of Nina's mind, accompanied by distance enough to view her planner pages and life as if it were all a snow globe, or a movie, or a telenovela, or something of that nature. That's really skilled storytelling and narration, and I admired Waxman's ability to both draw us in, and hold us by the shoulders so she could control how we consumed the story.
Like I mentioned before, there isn't a whole lot of distance between Nina and the narrator. And even though Nina is the leading lady, the narrator felt like its own character too. The narrator is what made the book so humorous and light-hearted, and it was the narrator who kept us all on our toes. The narrator is really sarcastic, witty, and well-educated--they drop fabulous one-liners, parentheticals, exclamations, what have you, just when we need it. Even though I didn't quite get all the references, I respected the humor the narrator was infusing into the text, and the way it helped the story move along. I was able to not take the whole thing so seriously, because of the narrator's way of portraying the story. There was one moment that didn't quite sit well with me (which I have detailed below), but other than that, I got the fact that the story was meant to be enjoyed, consumed, and entertaining. I appreciated the narrator's character just as much as Nina's, because the story needed this specific kind of narration to be interpreted in this specific way. I don't want to give anyone the interpretation, but hopefully this kind of analysis on the narrator's presence gives you an idea to the importance behind this interpretation, and a clue to what it is.
I have just begun to dip my toes in the water of romance, so my critique on the romantic element of this book might be missing some parts, and I apologize for that! I loved Tom's and Nina's enemies-to-lovers transition, even if it wasn't the central focus of the book. I think as characters they complemented one another nicely, and it was interesting to contrast how quickly things escalated between them with how things escalated with Nina's newfound family. At some points, I found their romance to be a little unrealistic, and it felt like the most "story" part of the novel if that makes sense--almost like a fairytale, since there wasn't always enough believability to the romance. The part that knocked this down to a four-star read for me was the fact that Tom doesn't react to Nina's anxiety very well, and how they don't actually reconcile with it, in my opinion. Tom basically ghosts the girl after she faints and tells him that she just needs alone time to recover, and Nina more or less assumes it's her fault--there was a lot about this moment in the book that didn't sit right with me, especially since Nina apologized to Tom about it. But she has anxiety, and the way it read was that she could have handled her anxiety better--and, like I said, that didn't sit well with me. Nonetheless, I do believe the way they made up, and the whole carpenter thing, was really cute. I guess it's just the nature of romance, to highlight the happy ending.
The storyline that focused on Nina's discovery of her family was my favorite, and arguably the most powerful. Each of the family members felt like fleshed out people, and I enjoyed their slow yet chaotic introduction into Nina's life. What I mean by that is Waxman gave us a whole cast of characters (with charts and everything!), and yet we get to know these family members in small, enclosed moments throughout the book. There's the original meetings and phone calls with Peter, the lunches with Archie, the time spent at home with Millie -- and there's the grand meeting with the lawyer and the charts, and the reading of the will to stand in contrast with that. While I admit that I didn't keep everyone straight, I think that was purposeful so that I could know what it felt like to be Nina throughout the novel. Waxman really focuses in on the themes of family and identity throughout the novel, and I think that's why I loved this specific storyline so much. Waxman had great lines on identity and discovery that resonated with me, and Nina also does horribly with change. Even though I know I will never be in Nina's shoes, I really felt like I was on this journey of self-discovery with her.
If you, like me, greatly enjoyed Abbi Waxman's novel, you can find more about Abbi Waxman on her website, abbiwaxman.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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