I gave this book 2 out of 5 stars.

In this novel by Matt Haig, Nora is a 35 year old woman, who decides she wants to end her life after the only being she has ever loved, her cat, Voltaire, passes away. First, the book documents the hours leading up to Nora’s overdose, and then after, documents her adventures in The Midnight Library. The Midnight Library is essentially purgatory, where Nora gets to experience all the lives she could have lived, should any one decision in her life been made differently and sent her down a different path. Each life is represented in the form of a book, organized in a library of endless magical bookshelves which bring whichever life Nora chooses forth and then sucks her in. If Nora is living a life and begins to experience disappointment in that life, she is returned to the Midnight Library to choose a new life.

I heard so many people absolutely RAVE about this book, and I was so excited to read it! Unfortunately, it did not live up to the hype in my opinion. I thought the idea of the book was great, and had so much potential to be really interesting, but I couldn’t help feeling bored throughout most of the book. I expected it to be much more thought-provoking, intriguing, and emotional than it was in reality.

While the book was well written, I would have liked a lot more character development around Nora in the beginning, before she decided to overdose. More context around her character, history, and life in general would have made her experiences in the alternate worlds much, much more interesting, and probably more relatable. I didn’t feel like I understood Nora as a person at all at the point of her entering the Midnight Library, and there were very few points throughout the book that I really felt bummed for her when she drifted out of the life she was trying on. It wasn’t until almost the end of the book that I felt like I understood what it was Nora’s character wanted out of life. Maybe this was the point of the book? To develop this understanding alongside Nora? But if this was the intention, the execution just wasn’t interesting to me.

There were literally two storylines throughout the entire book that I thought were interesting, and it felt like it took me FOREVER to finish this book. It took two weeks to get through it, and I put it down several times to read other books. Honestly, I’m just glad I finished it, so I don’t have to pick it up again.

I was disappointed in this book, and I am racking my brain trying to think of something I really gained from it, but I think the entire book could have been summed up in this one quote:

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the read problem It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel up and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

I really wanted to love this book, but very sadly I cannot say it was a worthwhile read for me.

I would love to hear your thoughts about this book!