Andrew's Reviews > The Midnight Library

** spoiler alert ** The title evokes something a little more literary than what this book ends up being about, which is purgatory. Although the book is written in a light tone and has many funny moments, it's pretty bleak. Our hero, Nora, is given the opportunity to undo regrets in her past and try on lives she might have lived if she'd made different choices. Unfortunately, she's dumped into lives with no memory of what transpired between the critical decision point and the present day, dooming her to failure in each one. The pattern was evident from the start, which made the ending predictable even to me, a reader who usually stays in the moment and doesn't try to solve the mystery prematurely. It seems like an unfair, irrelevant puzzle to drop Nora into a life with no context, forcing her to grope her way through relationships and events, masquerading as a person who knows what's going on, lest everything crumble around her. There was some inconsistent, self-contradictory world-building, going back and forth between a false urgency to choose a life and stick with it because she couldn't go on trying out lives forever, and the opposite.

I liked the book and the characters, and it was fun go with Nora on this adventure, visiting all the places and situations she visited. It was just uneven and confused about itself, with a hackneyed message that you can see coming a mile away.