The Midnight Library

 The Midnight Library

By Matt Haig

Nora Seed is having a bad day. She's in the midst of a bout of depression when she loses her low-paying

job at a music store -- basically for showing up depressed. Then she misses a music lesson with her only pupil, who decides to quit the instrument. And, finally, her cat dies. It's all too much for Nora, who once had the world at her fingertips. She was the top swimmer in the country. She did well at university. She even had a music contract with her band, The Labyrinths. Full of regret and without hope, she decides to take her own life.

Except it doesn't quite take. She winds up in the "Midnight Library", essentially a figment of her brain, where, as long as it stays midnight, she can try out the lives she would had lived had she made different decisions. She becomes an Olympian, a rock star, a glaciologist, a professor of philosophy, only to find that none of these lives are all they are cracked out to be. Finally, she realizes -- shocker -- that her "root" life is the one she really wants to live.

I can't say I thought much of this book. It was all so cliche and predictable. The life skipping thing seemed like a replay of "Quantum Leap". And it was pretty clear where this was all headed. Value life! Even the mechanics of the midnight library were clunky. Nora drops into a life with no idea what is going on, so she's not really living that life or that person. It all felt pretty silly, and it was a slog to get to the end.