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At 35, Nora Seed has had, and passed up on, plenty of opportunities to succeed or “live life fully” in some way: to compete seriously in swimming, to sign a contract with a record label for the band she and her brother started, to become a glaciologist, to work in the field she studied at university (philosophy), to get married, to go live in Australia with her best friend. Now, she works at a music shop in her small hometown north of London; she’s single, and she and her best friend don’t talk much. The day she loses her job and her cat dies, Nora realizes she’s not cut out for life somehow: She has numerous regrets and she feels she’s a failure. So she decides to be done with it.
Next thing she knows, Nora is walking into a big building, and it’s full of books: shelves everywhere. She meets the librarian, who tells her she needs to read some books, starting with a heavy tome full of her regrets. Looking through it overwhelms Nora. But the librarian tells her she can then open any of the other books in the whole library, one at a time, giving her an opportunity to step into any of the possible lives she could have lived, had she made different choices. So Nora tries out a life where she married, then one where she didn’t quit the band, one where she became a glaciologist, and so on. She finds great success in lots of ways. But as she goes from option to option, erasing her multitudinous regrets, she has a hard time finding one she’d just like to stay in. And Nora comes to wonder what exactly she wants from life, what “meaning” would mean to her.
The concept of The Midnight Library is not original; the conceit of how the library is set up is, but the plot of a character getting chances to relive life or different possibilities is not. Early on, I felt I had a good idea of where the book would end up, and I was right, and I won’t say what popular story I felt it most strongly reminded me of so it won’t be a potential spoiler, but the book still rang true and reminded me of how important life is, even if we aren’t doing “important things.” Each of us can find fulfillment and purpose in the smallest and simplest of actions. It’s a lovely book from a talented writer who knows how it feels to battle depression and how to find hope, and he expresses it so beautifully through stories that capture universal truths. I have four other books of his marked as to-read, and I’m going to get on to one of them soon.
Rated: High, primarily for profanity: about 20 instances of strong profanity, a dozen or so uses of moderate language, and 10 uses of mild language, as well as a few instances of the name of Deity in vain. Characters have sex, but there are no details. One brief mention is made of a texted photo of a naked body part. A few deaths occur, from a car crash and from overdoses. The main character tries to commit suicide.
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