Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library is on many must-read lists and deservedly so. The Midnight Library’s Nora Seed isn’t having a great day when she travels to the Midnight Library, a library filled with books of her alternate lives. Nora is allowed to inhabit a different life, spawned from seeing how the other path of a decision played out. In her “root life,” she’s an unemployed piano teacher with few options. In other lives, she reconnects with a former lover, lives out her former career choices, and goes out for coffee with a friend she declined the first time.
This is an entertaining book to read. The idea of a library where all the books detail multiple versions of your life is fascinating. The different threads could have descended into boring choices, but they never do. Nora is both herself and a completely different person in each one. Her body changes as she inhabits every different life choice, one of the little extras that works so well here. This book is never a slog to read.
The idea of a library where you can travel to other versions of your life sounds more middle-grade or young adult, but Haig keeps us squarely in adult territory. Yes, the plot repeats enough times you anticipate the rhythm of each life choice. Nora quantum leaps into a new life, learns something, and then goes back to the library. Though this pattern could tire out quickly, it doesn’t. The experiences themselves are vastly different. She, and the reader, enter her life to find out what her choices have wrought. The narrative never explains how Nora’s choices caused the resulting situations, leaving the readers to fill in the details—a wise choice. It uplifts the book and makes for an interesting narrative.
The Midnight Library, at times, doles out a lot of exposition. It details to the reader a string theory sort of explanation or a psychological supposition. A little tightening of those scenes would have been appreciated. However, the ending, without shouting its theme at us, perfectly adheres to what The Midnight Library has been telling us throughout its narrative. Without giving too much away, it could’ve pandered to our desire to leave Nora in better circumstances, but that is a different genre of fantasy—the fairy tale. No, this fantasy illuminates how we live our lives on this complex planet, and it’s a better book for it.
The Midnight Library is part “what if” narrative and part self-help guide. All parts leave the reader with a wondrous feeling. For certain, it’s a book that belongs in your library.