 Popsugar Reading Challenge category: Healing fiction.
The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig. I'd never heard of "healing fiction," but this title came up a lot in discussions. Maybe this genre just isn't my jam. Predictability is not necessarily a fatal flaw in a book. We all know the detective will solve the mystery, and the romance will end with happily ever after. But in this book, the predictability is so obviously in the service of Making a Point. After a series of emotional blows, a depressed Nora Seed takes an overdose. Hovering between life and death, she finds herself at the Midnight Library, with an infinite number of books. Each represents one of the different lives she could have had, if she'd made different choices. Nora can try out as many lives as she wants, and stay if she finds one she'd rather have. You see where this is going, right? Every life turns out to have its own disappointments. When she makes an objectively "better" choice, it leads to a tragedy that could not have been foreseen or prevented. In her original life, her father's death was devastating for Nora. But when she winds up in a life where he survived, she still chooses not to stay. It would seem inevitable that she would experience some guilt (however irrational) that his chance of survival was indirectly due to a choice she made, but this is just glossed over. Finally she finds a life that's perfect. But wait - it's too perfect. It can't possibly be a spoiler to say that she returns to her original life. And lo and behold, it wasn't as bad as she thought. There were people she thought had rejected her, but she'd misunderstood. Things that she'd thought were her fault, actually weren't. A brighter future awaits. The book deals with some heavy issues: suicide, addiction, mental health. But the "Making a Point" tone makes it feel like it was written for kids.
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