The Midnight Library

Trigger warnings: Suicide ideation, depression, drug use, drug overdose, toxic relationships, parental deaths

So I'm rather in two minds about this one. On one hand, I appreciated the underlying message of this book and it did make me pretty emotional at the end, but on the other, I couldn't completely get rid of this tiny feeling at the back of my head that some parts of the premise were a little too simplified and too convenient. It's hard to discuss more about that without some pretty big spoilers, so I'll be hiding all of my plot-related thoughts behind spoiler tags.

On a non-spoilery note, the writing was very pleasant and fairly light. It read very smoothly and easily, and I found myself breezing through the book. I'm reading this with an online book club, and some of us complained that there weren't chapter numbers which made it difficult to post our thoughts, but perhaps that is a problem unique to being in an online book club. There were also some chapters that was just one or two pages long, sometimes even just one sentence long. Even after finishing the book, I was never really sure if there was an impactful enough point to this strange chapter structuring. I could probably come up with some fluffy reason for it but I don't know if it was really justified by anything we actually read in the book, and I'd feel like I'm making excuses for Haig.

Nevertheless though, I do feel like Haig might have had personal experiences with the mental health issues dealt with in this book, or at least have been close to people who did. There is a sort of intimacy in the way he describes and depicts depression and even suicide ideation. If this is in any way triggering to you, I'd recommend staying away from this book all together as it is a major theme that the whole plot revolves around.

Now for the spoilery bits. I think I first sat up and paid attention when Nora met Hugo in her Arctic glaciologist life. To know that there were other people out there sliding between lives as well was something I hadn't expected to happen in this book, and I was wondering whether they'd go anywhere with it. I guess perhaps one could argue that the point of Hugo being there was to show how we could easily get lost flicking through possibilities instead of focusing on living the one life we have, but I feel like that point could've been driven home a bit more. The character of Hugo, ironically, felt like a huge potential that was missed. Another thing that kept coming back to me was wondering whether it was deterministic to say that this or that person might've still ended up the same way in these other lives. For example, Dan. Will he always be an asshole in every version of Nora's life? If he is, why is that? Nora can only access lives that branch out from a decision she has made differently at some point in her life, but I feel like what this book didn't (or maybe couldn't) talk about was how in any and every version of our lives, it's just as much influenced by other people's decisions that directly or indirectly impact us. Nora may have chosen to get married to Dan, but Dan also chose to be an asshole. Nora may have chosen to focus on swimming but multiple people made decisions that became stepping stones on her journey to becoming an Olympic swimmer, like perhaps a teacher who decided to give her time off to attend swim training, or a coach who decided to properly focus on her strengths instead of another athlete's. Just as Nora's decisions impacted others (having her brother Joe become her manager, or dying of drug overdose), other people's decisions impacted her too, so I couldn't completely buy into the idea of - “if I had chosen swimming, this is the one and only version of my life that could have happened” or “if I had given up teaching music, this kid Leo would 100% certainly have ended up as a juvenile delinquent”. I think this thought kept recurring to me while reading this book and I kept constantly wondering whether the book was going to resolve it but apparently it didn't.

Overall though, this was a pretty feel-good book that still raised a lot of thought-provoking points, provided that you are OK with the trigger warnings.