THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY by Matt Haig

Nora Seed is in her mid-thirties, and she is depressed.  Instead of seeking out a good therapist, she tries to kill herself.  In limbo between life and death, she lands in the Midnight Library, where she can review her “book of regrets” and try out some different paths through life that would have resulted from having made different choices.  The outcome of this book is painfully predictable, and the highlights are when Nora has to improvise her way through lives for which she is frightfully unprepared.  The prose is choppy, and it’s basically a fictional self-help book—too preachy, too moralizing, too heavy-handed with the life lessons, and too flippant with regard to attempted suicide.  Perhaps this book can inspire a reader to give pause to some minor self-reflection, like a Mitch Albom or Fredrik Backman book might, but it’s also just as poorly written and unappetizing as books by those guys.  Speaking of heavy-handed, Nora Seed’s real life is called her “root” life.  Root?  Seed?  Really?  It fails in the originality department, too.  In this book, Nora meets a man who experiments with thousands of different lives and calls it “sliding.”  Remember the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, which explores two different fates?   I don’t mind reading a little fantasy now and then, or even some magical realism, but when Nora encounters several seemingly intelligent people who admit to believing in parallel universes, I just threw up my hands in exasperation.  Nora is obviously not the only character who needs a good therapist.  This book is way overrated.