The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Until now, most of Nora’s life has been full of regrets. She feels like she let every chance pass her by and that she’s let everyone down. She feels stuck with nowhere to go. But all that changes in one very strange night.
The books in the Midnight Library allow Nora to live life as if her regrets didn’t happen, she can undo every regret she’s ever had! She has all the opportunity in the world to do things differently, to have a different life. But things aren’t what they seem and soon her choices may place her in more danger than she could have realized. She must learn what the best way to live is. What is the secret to happiness?
Content Warning: suicide, death, drugs, alcohol, depression.
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This book was a phenomenal read. I know there’s a lot of mixed reviews on this book and, honestly, that’s one of the reasons I waited so long to pick it up but it was such an enlightening journey! Indeed, it is fictional, but I realized a lot of things about myself while reading this book and I couldn’t stop tabbing fantastic quotes throughout that I will forever flip back to on some of my down days. It’s a great story detailing the many ways people can struggle with depression, the importance of mental health awareness, and most of all: kindness, you never know how your words or actions could affect someone no matter how small it feels to you. I think Matt Haig dug into the stigma of mental health in a brilliant way through this fictional work.
Nora Seed is our main character and we follow from her point of view as one single day in her mediocre life goes from bad to worse to horrid. In the area between life and death, she finds a library, a library that runs only on midnight. In a library full of books containing each type of life she could have had based on every opposite decision she could have made her entire life, it’s understandable how overwhelmed Nora becomes. But as she tries on different lives and sees how her life would have turned out if she hadn’t said “no” or “yes” to certain things, she’s unsure where that leaves her. As she struggles to find a life that brings true happiness, she finds herself lost in herself. As her journey of self discovery commences, the author not only details Nora’s self actualization, but brings us on a journey of our own self-discovery as well.
I felt a deep kinship with Nora. She was an easy character to empathize with. Matt Haig gave her life problems that are quite common and explored the different ways some of these things can affect different people and the different avenues of mental health a person can go down in one life. The people that enter and leave Nora’s life were also very relatable in that we all have each of those types of people in our lives (or even find those personalities as different aspects of ourselves). It was magical to live so many different lives through the same character. The character development was slow which could be frustrating at times but by judging what place Nora was in when we started, the slow progression of her characters awareness of life and what makes it worth living is understandable and all the more magical once we get to the end.
The concept of the library itself was a neat way to portray life after death, an in between, the place where people go to when they’ve “seen the light”? Who knows? It stays mysterious and I loved that about this book. We didn’t spend the entire story trying to understand this place. It just was. It was also very philosophical on how the human brain uses coping mechanisms to understand things well beyond our realm of reasoning. It detailed the different ways people cope with loss or illness or ultimate change and how the way we cope can affect how we live our entire lives.
I felt very understood while reading this book, I think it’s very relevant especially for these “unprecedented times” that we’re living through. I know a lot of people have struggled this year and sometimes its hard to see the beauty of life while we feel trapped and uncertain but this book taught me to take a moment and appreciate all the beauty that is out there. One of the main lessons I took away was that sometimes when we think the worst, we’re the only ones who think that way. Sometimes it pays to stick around and choose to believe the best in people instead of assuming the worst.
Brilliant read. I very highly recommend it. It’s easy to get through, a nice steady pace with short chapters. It’s one of those books I hope to revisit. And I already have all my favourite quotes bookmarked to revisit over and over.
“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”