This book is so tedious I almost can’t be bothered. The Midnight Library follows Nora Seed, an Englishwoman with a rather nondescript life who’s fallen on hard times, both emotionally and financially. After a particularly rough day, she decides she would rather no longer be alive. She comes to in some sort of (god, this is annoying) celestial library, staffed by her favorite school librarian. Nora is told that she has been granted the opportunity to explore other possible lives, lives where she made different choices, dated different people, pursued different careers, etc.
What follows is a series of episodes wherein Nora inhabits different versions of herself. In one, she went along with an old boyfriend’s plan to open up a pub in the English countryside. In another, she never quit competitive swimming and in yet another she never left the rock band she started with her brother. There are a lot more, but I’m getting tired already.
Each of these lives, of course, comes with drawbacks. Nora is supposed to pick a new life to fully inhabit, but there is always something that keeps her from committing to each alternative existence. One problem inherent to the set up is that Haig has Nora enter each life with no knowledge of what she’s heading into. That turns each of these episodes into an exercise in improv, where Nora has to pretend she recognizes the people around her and remembers the past events they refer to. All of which, you would think, would rather throw off this little experiment. How is Nora supposed to accurately assess her potential new life if she has to spend all of her time there just playing catch-up?
Anyway, after a bunch of these scenes Nora comes to learn blah blah blah, meaning of life, not about success, friends and family true wealth blah blah holy freaking blah how did this book become a hit?
