Book Review: The Midnight Library

The longer it has been since I read this book, the more I despise it.

I just. don’t. get it. There’s a magical library you go to when you die that has all of the other ways your life could have been. It is somehow made of limitless lives, yet there are certain things that always would have happened? And you just get to rifle through picking books off the shelf until you find one you like. Or don’t. Everything else is pretty much exactly as you could imagine: a very unhappy person enters the library on the brink of death searching for where she went wrong in life. I wonder how this could possibly end?

This felt like such a stereotypical “It’s a Wonderful Life” take. I appreciated the sentiment, really. It is a good one. I just abhorred the way it was done. I couldn’t really connect much with Nora. She wasn’t a bad narrator, just kind of average. Which maybe was the point since she could be any one of us, with all kinds of regrets and dreams to pursue. But it didn’t make for a very interesting read.

Then the concept itself was boring. We of course get to travel with Nora into all of the lives she selects in the library, making this book almost more like a collection of short stories than a cohesive narrative. I wish I could say that sped up the pace of the book, but alas, it did not. Which could just be because I have very different interests than Nora, making her stories not something I wanted to peruse, but who knows. She was the only character who was truly important to the plot, so I won’t even mention the other bland ones. The thing I was most excited about in reading the blurb was the “magical library” which played a surprisingly small role in the overarching story.

In short, the only thing this book really made me feel was tired. There was no wonder or magic in it for me. I so wanted to have the eye-opening-life-affirming-transcendent experience that other readers had, but I just didn’t. I would say skip it if you aren’t a fan of big cliches with nothing new to add.

Rating: 2/5
Pacing: Slow
intended audience: adult
Content warnings: attempted suicide, mentions of drug overdosing, death of family members

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