First book of 2021 book club complete! So I may have jumped the gun a little on this one as I definitely had lots of time to read it, but my beaut friend bought me a Kindle (that's right she bought me a god dam kindle! Isn't she the best!) so I of course HAD to use it! So my first download was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.
Now Matt Haig has always been up there with authors I have wanted to try. I follow him online so I know what he is like on there and also that he discusses things like mental health which I was really interested in seeing how he covers this. The Midnight Library follows Nora Seed as she starts battling with her demons thinking about her life and what it could have been like. Nora has the chance to visit The Midnight Library, a library with infinite books of the infinite lives we have, all dependent on the choices we make. Nora gets the chance to try these lives to see which one fits her better than her current life, while also tackling the decisions she had made in the past that have caused her guilt.
I absolutely love the concept of this story. A chance to try on different lives, for example the life you would have had if you had decided not to break it off with your boyfriend, following a different career path or taking that trip across the world with a friend. I sort of understood the concept of the book before I started it and was already pretty excited to see what Haig had to say. His writing is simply beautiful. I think I finished this book within a few days it just flowed so well that in one sitting I managed about half of the book without even realising. I love the characters of Nora and Mrs Elm (Nora's high school Librarian) and also being introduced to various characters in each of the lives and how different their relationships can be through decisions we make.
This does cover a hard topic of mental health but I feel this is a very healing story. It isn't a self help book and it isn't purely just an entertaining story. It is a bit of both. I found myself feeling positive, and things were very negative in the world of Covid at the time of reading. But I found it uplifted me for a short while but in a clever way rather than just reading something nice, if that at all makes sense!
Books about mental health can sometimes be a trigger for people perhaps not in the right head space, but I think reading the whole of this book can be healing and even help anyone look at things through different eyes and can in fact help if you are not feeling 100%. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Pages - 288
Goodreads Rating - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
