Reviewing Matt Haig's The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library explores life and death, and how our decisions—no matter how small—take our lives in different directions.

Thirty-five-year-old Nora Seed hates her life. She doesn't have a relationship with her family, a husband to come home to, and doesn't even hold a job anymore. This brings her to a quite radical decision: committing suicide, though things don't exactly work out the way she planned. Nora finds herself in the midnight library, a space between life and death, where she's able to try out different versions of her life, which she could have lived, had she made different choices.

Nora is very likable and the reader finds themselves rooting for her from the beginning. Her struggles with life are relatable; although not everyone finds themselves in a place to want to die, everyone has wished they made a different choice at some point before, and wondered what would have happened then.

Despite Nora's despair and the somber beginning of the book, The Midnight Library ended up being a feel-good book for me. Reading Nora's feelings about her life made me reevaluate the way I felt about my own life.

The premise of the book is incredibly interesting. Who wouldn't love to try out the different lives they could have lived? The Midnight Library's exploration of the subject delivered.

The characters are believable and complex, and I enjoyed Matt Haig's writing style.

The book exceeded my expectations and I couldn't set the book down, so much so that I read the entire book in one go. It has become one of my favorite books ever, and definitely the best book I've read in 2022.

My favorite quote from the book: "It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living."