The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Grade: B
`Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. `And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’
from “The Midnight Library”
The main character of The Midnight Library is Nora Seed, a woman in her thirties who feels as though her life has been a string of failures, and the story begins with scenes from the worst days of her life and her subsequent suicide. Instead of meeting her eternal reward or punishment, Nora becomes stuck between life and death, in a place called the Midnight Library. This library contains all the stories of all the lives that Nora might have lived, and here she is given the opportunity to try out different versions of herself and to choose the one that suits her best.
The best thing about The Midnight Library is that it invites us to consider the lives we might have had if we’d made different decisions. In conjunction with the documentary I watched the other day, this story made me think about the life I might have had if I’d chosen archaeology as my major in college. That’s an interesting train of thought, but I didn’t need to read an entire novel to get on board. And perhaps in part because I ultimately chose literature, I prefer a more nuanced reading experience than what The Midnight Library has to offer.
Everything about this book, from the plot to the message, is glaringly obvious. There’s little new to be found in this novel except for the concept of the Midnight Library itself, but it comes off more like an IKEA than a mystical book repository. The writing is also clunky, with sentence fragments strewn all along the way, some of them large enough to be tripping hazards.
But the novel’s greatest weakness is that it pulls too early, too hard, and too often on the strings of emotional manipulation. The best example is the first example: Nora’s downward spiral and suicide. A book should start with something intriguing or action-packed but not too emotionally laden. Readers need a chance to know a character and care about them before being subjected to a lifetime’s worth of their emotional pain. I was in a bad mental state when I started this book, and the opening scenes dragged me down deeper into my depression. This didn’t make me want to kill myself, nor would it have been the author’s fault if it had, but I caution potential readers of this book: be prepared for this extra weight of sadness.
Many other reviewers found this book to be life-affirming. Its message, which is that life is precious and that each of us matters more than we realize, is an important one, especially during difficult times such as these. If reading this book helps anyone to see that, then hooray for The Midnight Library. I will donate my copy to the real-life library and hope that it finds its ideal reader there.