Science Fiction: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Rating: 8/10

Dear Reader,

I found this novel to be exactly the kind of read I was looking for. It was depressing and life changing, I was moved.

This novel starts off kind of dark, Nora Seed is going to kill herself. Nora loses her job, her second job, her cat, her parents, a relationship with her brother, and pretty much anything else you could think of.

So, Nora kills herself. She ends up in this middle way between life and death, in the midnight library. Each book she picks up and reads is another life of hers if she had made any different decision.

Was the constant repetition a little annoying? Yes. It was near 300 pages of Nora going to different lives, some lives were farther away from her root life and others were closer to her root life—meaning they were bigger or smaller decisions changed. Still, in each life Nora found herself depressed, lacking one thing, or wanting some thing else. Nothing was ever good enough for her, and it wasn’t necessarily annoying because Nora was annoying, it was just annoying because the situation was unfair, and it was unfair for an infuriating amount of time. Nora clearly decides she wants to live early on into the novel, but why does every single life she go to have to suck for that many pages. Why couldn’t Haig get to the point sooner?

-Grace Sofia