Review - 'The Midnight Library' by Matt Haig

"That is just me. I add nothing. I am wallowing in self-pity."

No truer words have been said by Nora, the world's largest wet blanket. Woe is her, folks.

Nora ends up at the Midnight Library, a place between life and death, because she doesn't want to live anymore. The library is full of books, each representing a life she could've had had she made different choices. Now she has a chance to undo all her regrets (of which there are many) and try out all the lives she's missed out on, to see if there's another one she would've liked better.

Lest you think I'm a cold-hearted reader for not loving this, I mean, sure that does sound like me. I count coins in my bathtub, chase children off my lawn with my gnarly walking stick, and club seals for laughs at least once a day, if not more. So what's to like? No no, I'm just kidding. Really.

Normally I love sappy, cheesy, inspirational mush. I watch Hallmark movies. I believe in soulmates and happily ever after. I cry during every sweet scene in every movie. And yet this book left me so cold inside, I got absolutely zero feels unless you count frustration as a feel.

For one thing, this story doesn't come across as fiction so much as self-help disguised as fiction. The lessons to be learned in here are pretty obvious right from the beginning, yet they are presented like some sort of epiphany that can only be discerned if explained slowly and repeatedly. We are forced to endure these same lessons over and over every time Nora goes back to the library. Either Nora is the most dim witted of characters, or the author thinks us readers are.

Another problem is that it's really hard to connect with Nora. She'll take any situation, suck every ounce of joy out of it, and interpret what's left in the most negative way possible. She's full of regret for every decision she's ever made, and thinks the grass is always greener. However, other than being negative, she literally has no other personality traits. She's a blank slate, dull and uninteresting.

I also have issues with the core messages in this book. Nora finally learns her lesson, but it's only after having fixated on each regret, remade every decision, and lived all subsequent lives. Like come on, at some point, you just have to be okay with who you are and the decisions you've made without knowing every single possible outcome.

But my biggest issue is that I'm really uncomfortable with this book's implication that if you're depressed, you only need to change your mindset and you will feel better. That goes against everything we understand about mental illness, including that it's important to seek professional help, that it can be chemically based, and that it's not a matter of not trying hard enough.

We already have enough trouble as a society getting depression and mental illness taken seriously, without a "feelgood" book coming along and implying that you need nothing more than an attitude adjustment to cure it. That puts the blame squarely where it doesn't belong, on the hundreds of millions of people who are suffering from depression. But it isn't just the layman who harbors such misunderstandings. It also includes people who work in the mental health field, and even some therapists and psychiatrists. So you can understand my dismay at the continued popularity of this book, which further perpetrates this extremely toxic point of view.

Please don't get me wrong. The message in here about having a positive attitude is a good one, and I'm all for it. But that worthwhile message slowly but surely got overshadowed by the implication that depression is nothing more than a mindset, and that's where I fall off the bandwagon. At times, I'm left wondering if the author started with the intention of the former and, over the course of writing this story, it somehow got away from him and he ended up with the latter instead.

Obviously many readers loved this book, as evidenced by its overwhelmingly favorable reviews. But it's decidedly not for me. This is the second book I've read by Matt Haig, and I've pretty much hated both. So I think it's time I part ways with this author and just accept that we're not compatible.

Readaroo Rating: 2 stars