Book Review - Matt Haig's The Midnight Library
Published by: Viking
Publication Date: August 13th, 2020
Format: Hardcover, 288 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy
The death of her cat was the last straw. Nora's life is a dumpster fire. No one needs her. No one wants her. She's been fired from the music store she worked at and her only piano student has quit. And then her cat died. There's nothing for her in this world so she decides to leave it behind. Only instead of dying she ends up in a library. There her old librarian, Mrs. Elm, tells her that she still has a chance. Between life and death there is the library. You can read The Book of Regrets and then choose another life. Take down a book from the shelves and live the life that could have been had one thing been different. But she must be careful, if she experiences disappointment the new life will reject her and send her back to the library. Nora doesn't want to play this game of what ifs, she just wants to die. First she chooses to not jilt her fiance, and she learns that perhaps she was never meant to marry him in the first place. Then more disappointment happens when she tries to save her cat. It was the cat's time, so her regret is erased but the pain of loss is not. It dawns on her, could she really spend this time suspended between life and death righting the wrongs of her life? But everything good that could have happened had negative consequences, fame led to the death of those she loved, and happiness seems elusive. She encounters another soul searching for his bliss. Although he encourages her to try as many lives as possible. Not to pick one right away and stick with it. Don't craft her happily ever after, go on a journey of self-discovery. And this is what Nora does. She experiences it all, fame, polar bears, vineyards, anything and everything she could have been is available to her but in the end it's hollow. She wants something perfect and permanent. That's how she finds the life with Ash and Molly. A devoted husband and a beautiful daughter. She becomes fiercely attached to this life but the voice in the back of her brain, the one that told her suicide was the only option, whispers to her that she didn't earn this life. And that's enough to throw her back into the library. But Nora has wasted her time as she did her life. Is it too late to go back to the beginning and try to fix it? To rewrite her ending?
If you are one of the legions of people who loved this book I'm glad for you, and glad that you support the aphorisms on wooden planks business that is booming and your psychiatrist who is buying their second vacation home thanks to you. For all of us who don't fall for gimmicks and pop psychology let me break down the ENTIRE message of this book so you don't have to waste valuable time reading it; as long as you have time and potential that's all you need. Seriously, that is the entire message of this book. I mean, it is a powerful message, it's just not one that needed hundreds of pages in which to tell it. The Midnight Library is cliched and trite and the more I think about it the more it annoys me. I don't want self-help masquerading as fiction. I know what my problems are, thank you very much, and I read to escape them, not analyze them. And I'm sorry if this offends you, but if this kind of advice was actually able to help me I'd feel pedestrian. I'm not saying my problems are more complicated or different than yours, what I'm saying is that if my psychiatrist, and yes I have a psychiatrist, spouted this hackneyed advice at me I'd fire him. Because this book just feels like a "teachable moment" and if there's anything more cringe than that saying, it's what's between the covers of this book. And that's not even getting into the structural issues I have. So you just "know" in one of Nora's lives the band she abandoned became a huge success, because of course it did, and yet you have to wait what feels like forever to get to that life. I mean, wouldn't that be like the very first alternative you you'd want to be? Also, all these other lives somehow exist and yet Matt Haig doesn't go into the details. In the life where Nora has a daughter her daughter knows it's not her mother. She's too different. Which would indicate that this version of herself exists even without her in the body. So is she quantum leaping into other hers? Because that would be kind of cool. Personally I don't think Matt Haig thought it through in this regard, mainly because it would improve the book and doesn't have an improving message. But part of me hopes that Nora is Sam Beckett and in an attempt to fix her own life destroys all the lives she leaps into. Now why couldn't an editor have given Matt Haig that note? Probably because it would only be read by a small select group of people instead of all the rubes needing affirmation that flocked to buy this book.
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