Book Review: The Midnight Library

One considerable part of my life I struggle to face is the inevitability of death. As I've aged these past couple of years and have seen people I know grow older and pass away It's done well in embedding a deep sense of anxiety in me. Our lives are so small in the scale of things and I have a deep rooted fear of the idea that nothing follows once we pass. This fear extends into my  daily life because I feel if nothing comes after, then I should be trying to make the most of each day and trying to live a perfect life to make the most of the time I do actually have.  This anxiety does an incredible job in making me feel resentful and isolated in the idea that I'm not achieving anything. I try so hard to fight these feelings and keep them at bay and focus on being happy in each day as it comes but the difficulty varies from day to day.  

The reason I gave you that deep insight into one of my biggest anxieties is because The Midnight Library did a good job in taking them and helping me find a much more manageable way to deal with them. Written as a fictional story by British author Matt Haig; the story of The Midnight Library follows a struggling, isolated woman called Nora Seed. Nora feels her life has been a collection of bad decisions and outcomes one after the other. Feeling alone and with no real reason to continue she tries to take her own life, only for her to wake up in the Midnight Library. The Midnight Library  is a magical environment which holds a near limitless amount of books for Nora to read. These are no normal books though, they each take Nora into a different type of life she could have ended up having depending on certain variations and choices she might have made. The purpose of her time in the Midnight Library is to find a new life she would be content living as apposed to her current one. The types of lives she can live range from small to large and each give Nora an ability to reflect on her insecurities with her own life and help her to identify what she wants truly by the end of it all.

I absolutely love the narrative at play here! It's so easy to relate with Nora and her sense of insecurity and failures in her current life. The idea that she feels so defeated and at odds with the life she is in, putting her down the difficult and depressing choice to kill herself, it's some truly grim stuff which I can only imagine so many people have gone through feeling at one time or another. The idea that she is given this unlimited range of lives to choose from to replace her current life makes for an incredible premise. Initially I was assuming she'd be going into more fictional lives like if she lives in the 17th centaury or the far off future; but the idea that each of the lives revolves around choices she might have made grounds the narrative superbly. Each of the lives Nora visits has their own appeals and they offer a lot of variation and insight not just onto her character but it gives Nora a better way to understand the lives of the people she had around her. It's not just her life that changes in respect of these choices, the lives of everyone around her shift direction too. It's a brilliant story about how grounding yourself in your current life is the only control you have and resenting choices you may or may not have made may not have always given you the happiness you desired; it's such a strong message that easily resonated with me in leaps and bounds.

In terms of pacing and tone too I think the book keeps the momentum going from beginning to end brilliantly without much fault. There's never a moment where I felt the story drags down the pace because Nora never sticks in one life too long so it gives the reader a variety of tales to keep them engaged all throughout.  In terms of tone I consider this book a very strong and emotional journey which does well in covering some pretty adult concepts but with a written style than any younger reader could potentially come to appreciate. It tackles a lot of fears and anxieties I imagine a lot of folk have and it does it in a way which is respectful and gives people insight and inspires them on how to deal with it like Nora learns to.

The Midnight Library won the 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction and after reading it fully myself I can see why. It's an incredibly compelling book with a charming and engaging narrative that covers so much relatable content for it's reader to relate to. It's definitely helped me reaffirm my perspective on those anxieties I have with my life and I hope to try find happiness in my life as it is as apposed to what it may have been.