The Midnight Library by Matt Haig ~ Book Review
ID: a picture of the book “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig. The book has a library with an open roof on it and a cat on a dark navy blue background with starts surrounding it.
Hello Friends,
I had originally planned to review a different book for this week’s post but then I finished The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and decided I needed to get my thoughts down in writing for this book first.
The Midnight Library is classed as an Adult Sci-Fi novel, though it’s not your usual sort of Sci-Fi and as someone who mainly reads books within that genre, aside from the fantastical Library and what our main character is experiencing within it, {which I’ll get into shortly} many of the chapters read like Contemporary fiction, so if you’re not really a lover of the Sci-Fi genre, then this might be one to try to ease you into the genre.
Before I tell you a little more about this book and my thoughts on it, I do want to give you a heads up on some of the trigger warnings that accompany this story and which I’ll touch on in this review:
Depression
Suicide
Death ~ Pet and Person
Loss
Anxiety
Failure
While these are topics spoken of throughout the book, you’re hit with all of them within the first 30 pages of this book and I found that a little difficult to deal with personally. So just something to be aware of if you want to pick this up. Once you get through those first 30 pages however, you see how necessary everything was for the rest of the story.
Okay just from the above you may be wondering what on earth this book is about? Well, let me give you the synopsis straight from the inside cover:
“Between life and death there is a Library.
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. with the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices places the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before times runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?”
The whole premise of the story is centred around Nora and the decisions she regrets in life ~ some big, some small. We first meet her as a teenager, where we see her playing Chess with the School Librarian, Mrs Elm. We get a sense of not just their relationship but also small insights to the relationship Nora has with her family. Then 19 years on, after a series of events contained within the next 30 pages of the book, Nora arrives at the Midnight Library and is offered the chance to undo those regrets and find herself a new life.
The first book the Librarian, who looks a lot like Mrs Elm, gives to Nora is called The Book of Regrets. To Mrs Elm, this book was light to hold but when Nora tried to hold it, she had to put it on the floor and sit down as it felt so heavy and as she became so overwhelmed while reading through it that she had to close the book and can’t bring herself to look at it again. I thought this was so cleverly done because our regrets can often feel incredibly heavy and the what if’s can be overwhelming if we dwell on them for too long. I found having that physically represented as The Book of Regrets was quite a powerful image.
ID: A graphic with a starry navy blue night sky, the quote written in white letters reads: “But it is not lives we regret not living that are the problem. It is the regret itself.” by Matt Haig.
After this experience, Nora is then presented with never ending bookshelves full of books that contain an infinite number of lives for her to choose from, all she has to do is a choose a regret she’s like to undo and the books move on the shelves until the book with that life is in front of her. On opening the book, Nora then gets to “try” that life. However, if she begins to feel disappointed with that life, she will arrive back at the Midnight Library and then she can choose another life to “try”. If Nora decides she wants to stay in a certain life, as time goes on, she’ll begin to forget about the Midnight Library and her root life and start to remember more about the life she has chosen.
We follow Nora as she chooses different regrets to undo and watch what impact those have on her life, as well as the lives of the people she knows. In some lives, she’s rich and/or famous and in others she has a Masters Degree and is writing a book. But as she tries different lives, she begins to learn that it’s not just the big regrets that can have the most impact on her life, but the smaller ones too. Even the smallest regret she wants to change can mean that she never met a certain person and so finds their life is completely different too. Depression can often make you think that you’re unimportant to everyone around you and that no-one cares ~ when the exact opposite is true and with certain characters within this book, Matt Haig illustrates that so well.
The Sci-Fi element that comes into this story to explain the existence of the Midnight Library and all the alternative lives Nora can choose from is wonderfully explained by a character Nora meets up with in one of her chosen lives. This is where it could get a little technical if you’re not scientifically minded or you’ve never watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory, but Matt Haig does a beautiful job of not making this too complicated. I do feel this might be a little bit of a spoiler to go into more detail about as knowing this information would probably have taken away a little of the magic surrounding the Midnight Library when Nora first arrives there. So all I’ll say is “Schröndinger’s Cat” ~ if you know, you know.
My copy is the Waterstones exclusive edition, {now sold out as it’s also a signed copy} and it includes an extra chapter or “Notes in the Margins” as Matt Haig called it. It relates to a character in the book which Nora meets up with a couple of times in different lives and I found myself wondering about this character as I read on with Nora’s story. So to have this chapter included gave me a lovely sense of closure for them.
I will be honest and say that my main worry when going into this book was that I knew Mental Health was going to be a big part of the topic. If you’re familiar with Matt Haig and the other books he’s written, then you know he’s incredible open about his personal struggles with Mental Health Conditions. This is of course, a truly wonderful thing as it helps shed light on these conditions and fights the stigma against them. However, when you deal with your own Mental Health Conditions, reading about them can sometimes be a two-edged sword. On the one hand, you feel less alone in your daily struggles and find some comfort in reading about a character dealing with similar feelings. But on the other hand, it can be difficult to read about someone else’s struggles, fictional or not, because you find them all too relatable. While, of course, Nora is a fictional character, just knowing that Matt Haig is very familiar with Depression and Anxiety, made Nora’s struggles feel even more real to me at times and more relatable. I knew the person behind the character knows exactly how she would be feeling in a particular moment or situation, because he’s likely felt it himself and that made it all the more powerful!
ID: A graphic with a starry navy blue night sky, the quote written in white letters reads: “Never underestimate the big importance of small things.” by Matt Haig.
Overall, while a difficult read at times, {yes I was crying by page 6!} mainly I think because I did find certain parts of it very relatable, The Midnight Library was a very insightful and thought-provoking read. It left me feeling like this was the book I never knew I needed to read until I’d read it and I think it’s a book that will stay with me for a quite a while yet.
Stay Safe. Read More.
L x
