The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this knowing literally nothing about it other than I've read two other books by him and he recently won the 2020 GR Fiction award. Plus, the title. The title was nice and I trust the writer, so I was like, WHY NOT?

I kinda expected some fantasy treatment with a nice librarian. What I got was a fantasy treatment with a nice librarian.

The adventure?

It's all about regrets, baby. So strap yourself in, get your failed life perspective glasses on, and start feeling sorry for yourself, because it's time to try all those other lives on for size. Do it again. Make all those other choices. Get your Schrodinger's Cat on.

That's it, really. Best of all possible worlds.

Of course, a novel like this is all about the journey. And as for the journey, I enjoyed every second of it. It's always fun seeing what could have been. What if, what if, what if? And we get a LOT of those.

So why is this actually called regular Fiction, rather than Fantasy? No clue. It looks like an utter fantasy to me. But these lines are divided very strangely. Almost as if someone arbitrarily made some strange choice in the past and catapulted this novel into a strange new alternate universe where it was DIFFERENT.

I had fun. Got a few tears. Felt depressed, then good again. It's that kind of novel. :)


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