I’m behind when my 82 year old mother has beat me to reading a book. The Midnight Library has been on my kindle for months and I’ve just been waiting for the right mood to jump into this bit of fiction. The synopsis never grabbed me, but I’ve not heard one person say that they didn’t enjoy reading this book.

Nora Seed is having a rough day in a tough life filled with regrets. Today her cat has died, she’s lost her job, her old bandmate yelled at her on the street, and her brother and best friend are ignoring her calls. Each addition to this lousy day makes the despair grow until she doesn’t see a reason for living. When she opens her eyes to her favorite librarian from her grade school library, Mrs. Elm explains that she’s in the Midnight Library where her alternate lives in other dimensions lie in the books on the shelves. All she has to do is find the right life and choose to live it and she will give up her root life and move forward as if it’s never been lived. This concept of “other” Nora’s living out the different choices she may have made is a pretty cool concept and one that made for great storytelling, so I can see why this book has received so much attention.

As I read this book I was enmeshed in each life of Nora’s, learning as Nora did that past regrets don’t necessarily mean that if she’d chose that path her life would’ve been any happier. In fact, her biggest regrets turned out to be not so great. As Nora sifts through her alternate lives she learns many things but the biggest is that the grass is not always greener if you’d chosen a different path than the one that she actually did take. I found this concept to be so easy to relate to and actually kind of comforting. No one likes to think that they would’ve been happier if they’d just made that different choice ten years ago. Maybe because this specific lesson rang true for me particularly, it is the one thing that I can remember out of the many lessons Matt Haig was teaching to Nora in this book. For me, it was the most important.

I have seen comparisons to It’s a Wonderful Life and when I was telling my husband the plot that is the exact thing he said to me. I’ll have to believe him since I’ve never seen the whole movie, but Nora did run the gamut from despair to hope and then happiness, realizing she did actually want to live just as Jimmy Stewart did in that famous movie. Regardless of that similarity, the final moments of hope and happiness after feeling the lows of despair made this novel a keeper and I could see returning to it for that life’s lesson when my own life might need the reminder. Not that I was at that low point, but the reminder doesn’t hurt and I think I’ll be keeping this book around for those moments in the future when reading Nora’s story reminds me to look further than the moment I’m in and grasp those small moments of happiness and connection that make life worth living. ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

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