what I’m reading: adult assembly required by abbi waxman.

Laura Costello has just moved to Los Angeles when she is left homeless after a fire in her apartment building. After taking shelter in Knight’s Bookstore after a rain storm, she becomes friends with Polly who takes Laura under her wing and secures a room for her in the boarding house Polly lives in. There she meets the other residents in the house, including Rob, the handsome guy who lives in the room next to her.

This book returns to the characters we first read about in The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. I really liked that book so I was excited to read and learn more about the friends from the book. Unfortunately, I didn’t like this book at all, as compared to The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.

This book started out very slow for me and took a long time to get started. Even though Nina, Polly, and Liz show up in the first couple of pages, only Polly really plays a large part in the book. Also, I quickly realized I had forgotten a lot of the characters from the first book – I only really remembered Nina and Tom so I had no clue who Polly and Liz were and actually kept getting all three of the bookstore workers confused with one another.

I found the love story between Laura and Bob to be a bit boring. Here we have two attractive adults who both think they are unattractive and cannot fathom why the other person would like them. I mean, Rob’s nickname is Impossibly Handsome Rob so I couldn’t understand why he kept putting himself down. Additionally, it felt like on every other page Rob would get distracted by Laura’s hair or he would think that she was just so beautiful that he couldn’t even look at her. It got a bit tedious after a bit.

I was just super disappointed since I liked The Bookish Life of Nina Hill so much.

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