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  • The Midnight Library: A Novel
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Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
161,177 global ratings
5 star
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4 star
28%
3 star
12%
2 star
3%
1 star
1%
The Midnight Library: A Novel

The Midnight Library: A Novel

byMatt Haig
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lindaluane
5.0 out of 5 starsLearn to love being you
Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2020
I really loved this book!
Highly recommended for anyone who might need to learn to appreciate the importance of little things in life and how they are just as important as the big ones - and how we impact the people around us in little ways that make a difference . About learning to love who you are instead of being upset that you are not who others wanted you to be
I try to teach my students that only "they" know the best how to be "them" - this elaborates on that. I love Matt Haig as a writer anyway
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407 people found this helpful

Top critical review

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Patrick F
2.0 out of 5 starsPredictable, Simple, Ultimately Pretty Boring
Reviewed in the United States on October 2, 2020
Disappointingly trite.

I was looking forward to this book. In fact, it’s the first book in years that I actually pre-ordered. The premise is interesting enough: there is an ethereal library that exists between life and death. You are permitted to choose any book from the shelves and each book contains an alternative life. Each life is what would have resulted if you changed a single decision you regretted. Interesting, right? Like you could see what would have happened if you’d gone for that coffee date or pursued that master’s degree or kept playing piano. In the midst of each new life, if the life-hopper finds herself disappointed, she winds up back at the library to try again. Eventually, you’ll either find a life that is the best possible outcome or your “root life” blinks you away into death.

Unfortunately, the premise is played out in the most expected way possible. Nora Seed reverses her regrets and realizes that even the best alternate universes have uncertainties and pain and sadness and disappointment. Even when she winds up with her dream job and a great family, she can’t stay to play this life out. Why? Well, because it isn’t really “hers.” So, surprise, surprise, she ends up waking up from her suicide attempt with a new appreciation for the life she once had and longed to depart.

If you read the first 30-40 pages of this book, you’ll probably be able to write the rest of it in your mind. It’s supposedly an opportunity to explore infinite universes, so why choose the most predictable course of actions? To get across the point that you ought to realize the beauty of the life we have around us? Just write a greeting card to convey the message; an entire book is unnecessary. Additionally, it seems like the author either doesn’t understand or chose not to really explore the idea of infinite options. In all her lives, the most remarkably unique one is granted one sentence of exploration, “In one life she only ate toast” (212). Every other life is just variations on themes of work, friends, romantic partners, and family. Of the infinite possibilities available to explore, nothing unexpected happens. It’s maddening as the author keeps smashing his readers over the head with ideas that anything might happen while never delivering on the promise.

The writing style is difficult to evaluate. It just feels there. Sentence after sentence slowly moving the predictable story forward. It’s utilitarian prose lacking poetry and depth--seemingly at odds with a book that is attempting to spelunk the internal caverns of a deeply depressed person. The author constantly quotes philosophers but doesn’t seem to have any real interest in engaging seriously with philosophical ideas. It’s a novel in form but a cheesy self-help book in content. This novel is a seed of an interesting idea which was never cared for and died below ground. Unfortunate.

D-
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2,346 people found this helpful

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From the United States

Cathryn Conroy
TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE
3.0 out of 5 stars Boring, Banal, and Predictable: Don't Waste Your Money or Time on This Book
Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2021
Verified Purchase
Two succinct ways I viewed this novel by Matt Haig:

1. Underwhelmed
I say that because before I even purchased the book, I knew it had been honored with a slew of "best book" picks from Goodreads to "Good Morning America." Based solely on this, I had certain expectations. They were dashed.

2. Boring, banal, and predictable
The saccharine-sweet story set my teeth on edge.

Nora Seed is 35 years old and desperately unhappy. Living in Bedford, a small town in England about 50 miles from London, she feels like a failure both personally and professionally. She left her fiancé just two days before their wedding, she gave up on competitive swimming when she had Olympic potential, she did finish university with a degree in philosophy, but never managed to translate that into a job she loved—or even just didn't hate. Her brother isn't speaking to her because she quit their rock band. And her beloved cat has died. So Nora decides to die by suicide. When she is in that state between life and death (presumably in a coma), she arrives at the Midnight Library where Mrs. Elm, Nora's school librarian from way back when, is the mistress of this mysterious place. Mrs. Elm informs Nora that she may choose from all these millions of books on the shelves of the Midnight Library to see how her life would have turned out had she made different choices. That is, what if she had gotten married? What if she had pursued swimming and competed in the Olympics? What if she had realized her career dream of becoming a glaciologist? Or that even crazier dream of becoming a rock star? The bulk of the book is Nora coming back to Earth in the guise of these different lives that would have been.

I forced myself to finish it just in case it improved. It didn't. It was mildly amusing at best, boring and banal at worst. Don't waste your money or time on this.
63 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars Some good ideas
Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2020
Verified Purchase
A helpful and hopeful story. It felt like it was a bit rushed in the writing, not as polished as previous works. An interesting premise though that gave me pause for thought. How do we make room for regret so that we can live a meaningful life?
77 people found this helpful
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Timothy HaughTop Contributor: Baby
3.0 out of 5 stars Too Obvious for Me to Enjoy
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2020
Verified Purchase
I very much like Mr. Haig’s last novel, How to Stop Time, so it was pretty certain that I was going to read this, which looked to have many of the same qualities of the last one. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed in this.

The idea of “the midnight library”, a place of infinite shelves where all the variations of your lives play out (and an ever-changing book of regrets to guide things) is a great one. When Nora, our disappointed lead character, enters her library and we get a taste of its powers, we look to be on an exciting trip; however, the episodes that follow quickly become statements of the obvious. Nora is on a guided quest to learn a sequence of lessons that offer no real interest or surprises. By the time the end rolls around, any mystery has long since burned away and left an ending we have seen coming for a long while.

Perhaps a was a bit jaded when reading this because it seemed to echo the last novel I read (The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson) which, though it has problems of its own, I like much better. I also had very high expectations of Mr. Haig, which were unrealized. This is not a book I would come back to or recommend.
50 people found this helpful
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S.S.
3.0 out of 5 stars The reviews aren’t suited for everyone
Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2021
Verified Purchase
If I don’t think about a book years, weeks, or even days after finishing I don’t consider them life changing.
I forgot about this one as soon as I closed the book.
It wasn’t deep. Or insightful. I didn’t make me feel good. I didn’t do anything for me.
I don’t understand the rave reviews. Maybe people need to start looking beyond the Best Sellers list. There are a lot of jewels out there.
39 people found this helpful
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unco
3.0 out of 5 stars It felt overly simplistic
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2020
Verified Purchase
This book could have been so much more. It was a bit too sappy for me. It put me in mind of The Five people You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom but without the emotional moments. I did not feel a connection to any of the characters in the book not even Nora.
38 people found this helpful
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KasaC
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
3.0 out of 5 stars Good idea but problems in execution
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2020
Verified Purchase
I picked this up thanks to a reviewer who called the style and approach to a difficult subject, "comforting." And after last week's upheavals in the real world, I felt a dose of fantasy was in order. Enough has been written about the plot line (a library situated somewhere between life and death, where Nora, the main character, can revisit old regrets and dispel them by experiences an alternative reality). Initially, I found the premise sweet, but became impatient with some of the stylistic choices. For instance, when Nora enters the life that would have been if a certain choice had been different, she retains the sentience of her "core life," with none of the alternative. This became tedious very soon. What I did appreciate was Matt Haig's calling attention to mental health issues.
27 people found this helpful
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commandofthelanguage
3.0 out of 5 stars It was okay.
Reviewed in the United States on February 11, 2021
Verified Purchase
“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.”

The Midnight Library is the account of Nora Seed and her near-death experience thanks to an intentional overdose of medication. On a perfectly ordinary day in her unremarkable, mundane life, Nora finds herself depressed and helplessly watching her life and her relationships unravel before her eyes. Her mother constantly treats her like a mistake, her father is dead, she is estranged from her brother and her best friend, lost her job, and to top it all off, her cat is fatally hit by a car. Fully feeling the weight of her shame and regret, Nora see’s no other way around the consequences of her poor choices and mismanaged opportunities. So, she downs a bottle of prescription anti-depressants and waits for the end of her suffering to come.

She awakens somewhere between life and death, in the Midnight Library. After encountering a friendly face from her past, Nora quickly learns that this is not a dream and she is not in just any library. This library contains an infinite number of books, each one telling the story of an infinite number of parallel lives. Her lives. Lives she could have lived if she had made one, or two, or two thousand different choices. Nora is given the chance to step into any of these lives she chooses, to see what they may have been like, and if she finds one that truly brings her happiness, she will be allowed to stay. Before long, Nora realizes that there is no such thing as a life without certain disappointments and tragedy. There is no such thing as perfect happiness all the time, but that doesn’t make her life a failure.

The Midnight Library illustrates a scenario most have fantasized about—getting the chance to rewrite our lives by erasing our regrets. The exploration of parallel lives is thoroughly interesting to consider, and readers will widely appreciate the insightful, illuminating message around satisfaction and life experience. Others, however, may argue that the premise alone carries this plot. The dialogue and characters, at times, feel shallow and distant, emotionless and even immature. While the themes themselves (mental health and valuing life) are thoughtful and important, the delivery may fall a little flat for some looking to feel a deeper connection.
13 people found this helpful
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M. Gregs
3.0 out of 5 stars Meh?
Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2021
Verified Purchase
2.5 stars, rounded to 3.0 because of the ambition.

I really wanted to love this book. The premise sounded amazing, and as someone who suffers from anxiety and depression, this seemed right up my alley.

But unlike another recent read with a similar theme (LaRue), The Midnight Library lacked depth. Weight. Substance. I think part of the issue had to do with the book’s structure. The chapters were so short as to be jarring. Even within the confines of a single “life,” we’d come to an abrupt semicolon in Nora’s story every 3-4 pages that ruined the narrative flow and emotional investment. I’m sure this was intentional; there’s no other reason to structure a novel like this. But it didn’t work for me.

The other issue I had with this book was lack of continuity. I don’t mean continuity in terms of themes or events—all of that was fine. What I mean is that TML lacked a certain grounding force that kept us invested in all of Nora’s many lives. In LaRue, that grounding force was Luc, and, later, Henry. Addie’s relationships with those characters kept us emotionally invested in her story. Here, Nora <I>lacks depth</I> as a character (again, this is intentional—she is on a journey to find herself after all), and there’s nothing to ground her or the reader. Even Mrs. Elm is just a manifestation of Nora’s own subconscious, and, as such, lacks the required depth to sustain the novel.

There were some things I enjoyed about the book, but overall, it just didn’t do it for me. Maybe it’s time to stop reading books about characters with myriad lives...
13 people found this helpful
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Lauren Peterson
3.0 out of 5 stars Unpopular Opinion
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2021
Verified Purchase
Here I go again with an unpopular opinion, but I was one of few who found "The Midnight Library” to be a middle of the road read. I was honestly shocked when I saw it was Goodreads book of the year. I read "Dark Matter" earlier this year and that may be the problem. Like "Dark Matter," this book touches on inter dimensional travel, changing lives and consequences of doing so. The problem is "Dark Matter" is the far superior read in my opinion and I kept comparing the two since they had so many similarities. The story is about a woman named Nora who commits suicide only to find herself in a midnight library with a chance to try on numerous different versions of her life (each in the form of a new book) until she gets it right—or until she dies. The premise is fascinating and I wanted to be all in, but I wasn’t. I thought it lacked depth and for such an emotional journey I felt incredibly unattached to our main character.
11 people found this helpful
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Lucie
3.0 out of 5 stars The Midnight Library
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2020
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📖📖📖book review📖📖📖

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

“Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations . . .”

⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

I have to say that I was very excited to read this book and I could not wait to get my hands on it. However I have to say that my expectations were higher than the actual story. I do not want to give any spoilers so I’ll just say that it is an amazing idea of having a library full of books which contain all the possibilities of what your life could be like, depending on the decisions you make. And on top of that be able to erase some of your regrets. The idea is amazing, but in my opinion the execution was slightly poor, it was like taking a philosophical class combined with some self-help book. Not to mention some of the choices that Nora got to experience were slightly over the top, and she did not really get to live any of the lives before returning back to the library. However, I must admit that the end made it all better and there was a moral to the story which I really liked. It’s a story about depression,suicide and new chances, for some this could be a really good read, but for me, it wasn’t bad but I felt at times that I’m reading a young adult novel with a poor plot.
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