For some reason the selection tool is not working as I remember it. For selection you have to box around the entire object and not part of it otherwise the object is not selected. This makes it hard to select among multiple overlapping objects. This is inkscape 0.92 in mint19. Is there a way to fix this?

There are several ways to select something. One way is to drag a selection box around it. Sometimes objects are bigger than they appear to be, perhaps if they have a filter applied to it. Or sometimes objects might be grouped, meaning that you can't select individual objects in the group, unless you ungroup them, or enter the group. The status bar will tell you if it's a group, or whatever kind of object it is. Double-click on a group to enter the group (although note that even as an experienced Inkscape user, I find entering the group to be confusing, and I don't usually recommend it for new users).

Another way to select objects is to click once on them, and hold the Shift key to add more objects to the selection.

You can select objects which might either be hidden below other objects, or partially hidden so that they are hard to select, by using the Alt key. Alt + click selects the next object below the one which is already selected. While holding Alt, every click will select the next object down, until you come to the end of the stacked up objects, and it cycles back around to the top object.

And there are a few other more obscure ways to select. Here's the info in the manual: http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... elect.html