“You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in Sao Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.”
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
Philosophical fiction
★★☆☆☆
Spoiler Warning!
Nora Seed finds herself in the space between life and death. The midnight library gives her a chance to live a better life after she takes her own. The books in the library open her to a world where she made a different choice, usually involving one she regrets. Nora must live a number of lives until she finds the right one for her.
Doesn’t that sound so cool? It wasn’t. A great idea that was poorly executed. I was severely disappointed in this book, especially since I paid $25 for it because there is no paperback sold in store. Everything about this book was a huge disappointment. I saw a review that said it sounded like a terribly written self-help book, which I wholeheartedly agree with.
The plot literally had nothing to it. The whole time I was waiting for something interesting to happen. Sure, she’s going through a whole bunch of lives, which gets interesting to a point, but I don’t want to read a book just about all the lives she lived and how she hated them all. The worst part is, the life she loved was the one where she had a child to love. Lame and cliche!
If you haven’t guessed by the predictable plot, she decides to go back to her original life. She committed suicide because her best friend moves away and doesn’t keep in touch, her brother is angry at her for not wanting to pursue their band, and the boy she teaches piano quits. (But, oh boy, wait until you hear this!) She comes back and all of it was just a big misunderstanding! Her friend has simply not been able to answer her, but she’s moving back home! Her brother wasn’t angry, he just got out of a bad relationship! The boy calls and says he actually wants to continue lessons! I get the idea of “everything is not as you make it out to be” but I literally hated this ending so much.
I’m gonna add, the author, Matt Haig, is British so the slang is also very odd. British writing is slightly different and confusing, too. Also, apparently Matt Haig is a bestselling author of more children’s books than novels. I have a feeling that’s why the book was so bland. Maybe he should stick to children’s books because his ideas are boring and have no depth.
