The graphic of a planner page precedes the chapter and lists the date as Tuesday, April 30. It also lists Nina Hill’s schedule, to-do list, goals, notes, and meal planning. An omniscient third-person narrator describes Nina’s neighborhood of Larchmont in Los Angeles, including the bookstore, Knight’s, where Nina Lee Hill works. The narrator also addresses the reader directly, describing Nina as the “spinster of this parish and heroine both of her own life and the book you’re holding in your lovely hand” (4). Nina, who harbors a passion for books and loves her job at the bookstore, is annoyed by the customer trying to return Pride and Prejudice because she believes it to be boring. Nina mitigates her annoyance by imagining herself blasting the woman’s head off like a scene in Terminator 2. The woman says that Nina must have a boring life and walks out.

Nina is the only child of a single mother and prefers solitude. She doesn’t know her father; he had a brief liaison with her mother, Candice Hill, but she cut ties with him when she learned that he was married. Candice is an accomplished news photographer, and Nina was raised by a caring nanny named Louise.