Book Review: The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

by Joli
Published: Last Updated on

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig is such a popular book right now! With over 110,000 ratings on Goodreads, the rating is 4.23. That’s pretty dang good! I had seen so many rave reviews for it on Instagram and beyond, and was really hoping to fall in love. Read on to read my thoughts!

The Summary

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

My Review

Alright so, overall I did like this book. BUT, there are a few aspects that knocked off a couple stars for me, I’m sorry to say! I really wanted to be blown away – maybe that’s why I ended up giving it 3.5 stars.

I did like Nora, for the most part. She really hit some hard times at first, and I could understand her suffering. It’s hard to feel alone in this world. When she entered the Midnight Library, I was loving it. It was so unlike other books I’ve read, and Haig really throws in some nuggets about life and love that are beautiful sentiments.

A few of those sentiments are: “never underestimate the big importance of small things” and “while we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility”. I loved how Haig incorporated the philosophical ideas into the story.

What I didn’t love…is hard to put into words. The story in general was meant to be fantastical, but when Nora enters her possible lives and doesn’t know anything about them but is somehow able to figure out enough to pass as being THAT version of Nora, it was hard for me to get over the fact that that would just be so impossible.

I also didn’t love the bit where it says she went into a whole bunch of different lives to discover all the different things she could be, but just lists them and doesn’t go into further detail. With the intense realizations and such that she was making in each life, I felt like I went from being connected to the story to just being like wait, she did all of that and we didn’t get to see any of it? That felt like a miss for me.

So overall, I did enjoy this book. I looked forward to picking it up to keep reading and thought it was compelling and fun to read. The writing was great. It was just those few things that I didn’t particularly love.

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1 comment

fred March 20, 2021 - 3:58 am

I thought it was simple. In the sense of it didn’t require me to push myself to stretch or enrich my vocabulary. And then I understand it’s because it was rushed and also feels like an YA book but for people in their 30s?

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