Book Review: The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig


Like many books described as “uplifting,” this book started out like a gut-punch to my mental health, with a despairing woman attempting suicide after losing her job and her cat. After her suicide attempt, Nora Seed finds herself in the midnight library with her old librarian from school, Mrs. Elm. The two play chess and discuss the regrets in Nora’s life. Each book in the library is a different parallel life for Nora and she takes time to explore them, looking for the one she would like to live in.

For some reason, this book reminded me strongly of “A Brief History of the Dead.” I don’t think it was just the arctic/antarctic connection; I think it was because it was a literary approach to a well-known philosophy trope. It’s unambiguously philosophical–Nora has a dog named Plato and a cat named Voltaire, after all. If you love philosophy, you will undoubtedly geek out about this.

Nora is the kind of person who can do anything. She’s good at everything. She had the potential to become a gold-winning swimmer, a glaciologist, a rock star, a pub co-owner. Despite all these gifts, she’s desperately unhappy. She doesn’t want to live; her life is full of regrets, which are in a heavy book that hurts her to open. When she gets to the midnight library, she has a chance to live some of these extravagant possibilities and see what she’d been missing.

What she finds is that in every one of these lives, she struggles with depression and lack of meaning. She gets tired of cycling through endless lives, and frankly, I got tired of listening to her talk about them (I listened to this as an audiobook). It was kind of uncomfortable hearing her fake her way through another parallel life. After a while I just felt like cringing as she bumbled her way through pretending she belonged in another possible lifetime. Eventually, Nora finds a life she wants to stay in, but it doesn’t go swimmingly for her, and there’s a final plot turn.

The ending makes up for the long journey, but I didn’t love this book as much as I had hoped. I don’t know if it’s me or the book, honestly. I wanted to like Nora, but she seemed to have so much going for her and so little appreciation of what she had. For someone with so many gifts and hobbies, she rather bored me. I wanted to be excited by her parallel lives, but they were mostly uncomfortable floundering and white lies to pretend she knew what was going on. I liked the idea of parallel lives and I liked the library, but it took me a long time to finish this book. It was billed as being like a much-needed health drink for the soul, but it needed a little more melted cheese and a little less bran fiber. Nora needed a little more of a personality to make it exciting. It took a long time for me to root for her.




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