NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

Note: This content was written entirely by me and was not generated, edited, or researched using AI.

‘The Midnight Library’ (2020) by Matt Haig – BOOK REVIEW

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig was a great attempt at magical realism, but the story about the woman adventuring across parallel universes, with all its promise, did not stick the landing. Nora Seed, a music store saleswoman in Bedford, England, who’d developed the dreaded nodus tollens, decides to kill herself after a day of snowballing hardships by taking a fistful of pills. This is where she appears in front of a library in the ‘in between’. She enters, bemused at the revelation that in the library are an infinite number of green-cast books on an endless display of shelves that shuffle at her whim. Mrs. Elm, a librarian from her real past life and now spirit guide, tells her she has entered the Midnight Library, an interstice where she can live a life from any book she chooses from the shelves. Nora, overwhelmed by the possibilities, is given the Book of Regrets by Mrs.Elm to inspire her next decision. Here, she explores the “What if?” of the human experience.

“Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.

“She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale. She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying her best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.”

I will admit the book has promise in the initial stages, with rich stories of alternative universes in which Nora Seed was a mother, an astronaut, an Olympic gold medalist, a rock star, etc. These lives, beginning either with an intriguing lust or a heart-shattering blip in that universe, invite self-reflection and a unique perspective on life, one we are not to take for granted.

While there were revelations and the dots seemed to connect, the story’s perfunctory ending leaves the entire experience incomplete. Maybe that’s the point. Sometimes life doesn’t go as planned (in this case, the book didn’t) and you have to make the best of it and LIVE. Cue The Rolling Stones, please.

★★★

SYNOPSIS

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. [Read More and Buy Now]