Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Book Title: The Midnight Library
Author: Matt Haig
Genre: Sci-fi, fantasy
Published: August 13, 2020
288 pages
My rating: 4.5/5

“I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths,” she said, realizing something for the first time. “But maybe there are no easy paths. There just paths. In one life, I might be married. In another, I might be working in a shop. I might have said yes to this cute guy who asked me out for a coffee.”

After decades of disappointments and missed opportunities, Nora Seed, a thirty-five-year-old former swimmer and rock singer, philosophy graduate and a shop assistant, finally decides that life is not worth living and attempts to take her own life. She finds herself in the Midnight Library, a library full of books that contain the alternative lives she could have lived. The lives that she is now given a chance to try out with the promise that if she finds the best life for herself, she can continue living in that alternative reality.

I can see why so many people love this book and recommended it to me. The message and themes are important, the concept is intriguing, and I loved Nora as the main character. However, the story didn’t quite live up to my expectations.

The biggest problem was that I found the book really predictable. After the first twenty-five pages, you know Nora’s every regret and every alternative decision she could have made, which means that you know which alternative lives she will try. Plus, as a lot of the alternative decisions where things other people wanted from her rather than things that she wanted herself, it was easy to figure out that those alternative lives would not be the right ones for her. It wasn’t particularly hard to guess which life she ends up choosing in the end.

The beginning dragged but once the story started properly, it picked up speed. The pacing could have been faster in the first twenty-five pages and some of the things could have been cut. Listing all the miserable things happening to Nora (although they all played a role later in the narrative) just seemed excessive – like I get it, her life sucks, get on with the story.

Haig’s writing style is sparse and it took me a while to get used to it, but by the end of the book I really liked it. The problem with the style, though, was that you don’t really get to know any of the other characters. We learn that Nora thinks that Ash (her husband in one of the alternative realities) is a nice, dorky guy, but we don’t get to see much of him in action to truly get to know him. That’s true for most of the side characters – they slip and slide in and out of Nora’s life without making much of an impression on the reader.

The same issue was the problem with Nora as well. Although I loved her character and found her immensely likable, she was also somewhat of a cardboard cut-out. We never learn what she wants except to be happy, but what does happiness look like for her?

Another thing I had a problem with was the message that if you just change your outlook on life (“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see,” the mantra repeated several times in the book), your depression is magically cured. That message is not only wrong, but potentially dangerous for people suffering from depression.

The themes and message of this book that life is worth living is important, but they were hammered home repeatedly without giving the readers a chance to parse them out themselves. The story could have been stronger if every life lesson Nora learned hadn’t been spelled out as if the reader was incapable of understanding them. But alas, that’s not the parallel universe we live in.

I’m giving this book four and a half stars. Despite its problems, I liked the writing, the world-building, the concept of the midnight library, and Nora herself. And even though the message was a bit ham-fisted, I had a huge emotional reaction to it and cried so much. If you enjoy books that explore parallel lives and don’t mind the occasional self-help-esque tone, I recommend this book to you.