I can see how people could enjoy this book. There are some genuinely funny moments and it has a great premise, but ultimately, it just doesn’t work. Here’s why:

Nina is inconsistent as a character. What we are told about her and what we see are frequently in opposition with each other. She most prefers to be alone, yet she hangs out with friends multiple times a week. She hates spontaneity, yet she goes to a stranger’s house to craft at the drop of the hat. She has crippling social anxiety, yet she converses with new people easily and even goes to a wedding of someone she doesn’t know.

She has a vivid imagination, which is the strongest part of her character (because we know that only because we see it), and there are some good moments where we see her anxiety, but mostly, narration and dialogue do the work of telling us who Nina is, leaving the action to turn around and refute it.

The love interest and the romance are incredibly boring. The author makes an odd choice in that she occasionally switches to the love interest’s perspective, but this never adds depth. At one point, we get a love interest perspective and in the next paragraph, Nina says in her internal dialogue “I wonder what he is thinking.” But we were just told. (If you are wondering, he is thinking how hot she is. That’s it.) The characters don’t have chemistry or any good reason to be interested in each other.

The romantic plot and the secret family plot are completely unrelated. It felt like there were two different books in this book. Like it was supposed to be a romance book, so the romance was just shoved in there to make it qualify, and then the romantic plot took up too much time being boring and keeping us from the actual plot of the book. Getting the love interest POV moments were weird because the romance and that character just don’t feel like what the book is about.

All of the friends in this book are actually terrible. Both Nina and Tom’s friends ditch them multiple times to try to get them to spend time together even though they each explicitly stated they didn’t want that. Every time Nina sets up appropriate boundaries with friends or the love interest (Tom), this is framed as her being too anxious or anti-social, when actually, she is the only reasonable person in the situation.

Other smaller things I didn’t love:
-Romanticizing of gay men (gay best friend trope).
-Way too many Harry Potter references.
-The obsession with ownership and hoarding of physical books (I say, after reading this as an eBook from the public library.)
-The vague book lover as a character trait thing just did not work for me. At least show me how stories influence the character, rather than focusing on physical book piles.
-References to Millennial experiences felt off and a little gimmicky. (Not surprised to learn the author is not a Millennial.)

Unraveling the mystery of what Nina’s dad was like was interesting, but overall, this book fell flat.