Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

What a book! I absolutely adored the Midnight Library by Matt Haig 🥰. This was one of my favorite reads of 2022, I just could not put it down. This is a book about life – it is a story about regrets and choices. So often while living the life we have, we wonder about the life we could have had, how things would have played out if we made different choices at different points in our life 🤔 . In this book, the protagonist, Nora gets to explore these options, she gets to go back and change her decisions, sample new lives….does it make her happier?Maybe, the happiest life you have is the one that you are living today? Maybe life is just what you make of it? 🙃

What I loved most about this book was although it was a fictional fantasy story, it felt so real and authentic. Who among us has not wondered to ourselves, what if I had done this or that? 😳 What if I had stayed in school? What if I had taken that other job offer? What if I had gone to live in this country? What if I had dated this person? Our minds wonder about the other lives we could have lived. The concept of the book was also refreshing, your midway point between life and death is something that is significant in your life, for Nora it was a library 📚, for another character it was a CD store. It was a novel way of experiencing limbo, each time Nora experienced a new life, it was as simple as reading a new book, starting at a particular point in her life and making a different decision.

Overall, I will rate this book 4/5. I highly recommend it. It is a refreshing read and unlike any book you have read before. It will make you think and maybe see your own life from a new perspective ☺️.

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other 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, 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 lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of 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.”

Major themes: suicide, depression, love, hope.

It is available on Amazon at a price of USD 12.38 (paperback version). This book was published in 2020 and has over a million ratings on Goodreads (Rated 4.03 / 5 on this website) and more than 200,000 reviews on Amazon (Rated 4.3 / 5)

Have you read this one already? What did you think of it? If you have not read this, check it out 😁

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Much Love,

Celly