Step Into A World of Possibility In ‘The Midnight Library’ | By Ashley Tan Jeyin
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| Source: Amazon.com |
This is how the story begins: a woman whose life has been going from bad to worse is on the brink of ending it all. Nora Seed has lost her job, her best friend, her brother. Her only companion—Voltaire, her cat—is now dead. Tired of her meaningless life, she makes a drastic decision to overdose on her antidepressants. However, at the stroke of midnight, Nora wakes up, only to find herself lost in an unknown place: a library. There, she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the lives she might have lived.
The library looks like any other, except it has bookshelves that stretch on forever. Mrs Elm, the librarian, explains to Nora that The Midnight Library is a place that lies between life and death. The bookshelves go on forever, each book a portal into the other lives one could have lived. “Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
From there, Nora chooses a variety of lives and each time, she is undoing one of her regrets. She finds herself being a glaciologist, a wife, an Olympic swimmer, a vineyard owner, a music artist and so forth. Some lives last only a few minutes, while others last weeks. Whenever she feels disappointed by a life, she would reappear in The Midnight Library.
Personally, I enjoyed Haig’s writing style as the simplicity of the narrative appeals to me. Yes, the concept is straightforward, there are no plot twists and the ending is predictable. Yet, I was hooked from the get-go. That’s because the book has one ingredient that triumphs over all the weaknesses: hope. It taught me that we are capable of achieving our greatest dreams if we push ourselves through the hard times, that life is full of possibility no matter how dark it gets as long as we choose to keep living.
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| Source: @vikingbooks on Pinterest. |
A unique element of the story is the inclusion of deep, relatable quotes from philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau. It may be difficult for readers to root for a character like Nora, when she herself does not have the will to live, but the fact that she’s a philosophy major adds a much-needed layer to her character.
Additionally, the pacing of the book is fast-moving as Nora switches between many lives, each of which last from one sentence to a few short chapters. By the time you reach the end of the book, you’ll feel like you’ve tried out a portion of those infinite possibilities.
Overall, I would definitely recommend this book! It’s a story that I would reread time and time again to be absorbed into that world of multifarious possibility. It is a reminder that we don’t need to see everything, go everywhere or meet everyone to live a fulfilling life. In all lives we have access to the same emotional spectrum: love, joy, fear, pain. We just have to let go of regret and live in the moment because we are as completely alive in this life as we are in any other life. As this review comes to a close, I’d like to leave you with this quote:
“We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.”- Matt Haig
1 comments
Very well written. Bravo!
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