Book of the Month
by Michele Tester
The Midnight Library
This month, I picked The Midnight Library. This book was another pick for my book club and another recommendation by my daughter, who thought I would love it due to its thought-provoking themes. After reading The Midnight Library, I concluded that this book did indeed have several thought-provoking themes, which I suspect most people experience or struggle with at some point throughout their lives: the power of choice, the weight of regret, the heartbreak of expectations, the impact of forgiveness, the importance of self-acceptance, and the search for meaning.
The Midnight Library tells the story of Nora Seed, a 36-year-old music store clerk, who hates her life and is weighed down by regret, grief, and disappointment. She feels that she has let everyone in her life down, including herself. Nora loses her job at the music store, her cat dies, she loses her one piano student, the neighbor she always helped no longer needs her, she calls off her engagement to Dan just days before the wedding, and she has strained relationships with her brother and her best friend. Nora surveys her life and sees only pain and regret. Through Nora’s lens, she looks back on every decision she made and wishes she had chosen differently. Her life would be better, right, if she had made different choices? In Nora’s mind, every other life she could have chosen, every other path she could have taken, was better than the life she was in. Nora doesn’t want to live anymore. Nora decides to end her life.
When Nora awakens, she’s not at home anymore. She’s in what looks like a library, where she encounters her beloved high school librarian, Mrs. Elm, who comforted Nora when her father passed away, and with whom she used to play Chess. Mrs. Elm explains to Nora that she is in a place between life and death called the Midnight Library. The time, Nora realizes when looking down at her watch, is frozen at midnight. Mrs. Elm presents Nora with The Book of Regrets, a book that articulates everything Nora has regretted in her life. The other books in the vast library contain other lives Nora could have chosen but didn’t. Any book she chooses will allow Nora to see how her life would have turned out had she made different choices. Mrs. Elm explains that as soon as Nora feels disappointed in a life she visits, she will return to the Midnight Library.
Between life and death, there is a library. The story takes you on a journey with Nora as she continues to choose books containing the different lives she could have lived, the dreams she had as a child that she never pursued, expecting that these lives will be different, better, only to be thrust back to the Midnight Library time and time again. Every seemingly ideal life she encounters holds its own struggles, challenges, and regrets.
In The Midnight Library, I believe the author is teaching us that regrets don’t help us move forward; they only hold us back. We can’t change the past, but we can choose our futures. It shows us that success in different paths doesn’t guarantee happiness and that our expectations of success are often based on flawed and unrealistic assumptions. It also hits on something very important: self-acceptance. Maybe true happiness doesn’t stem from achieving check-the-box outcomes or living up to others’ expectations, but more from accepting our current life and all of its imperfections, then living it the best we can.
Take the journey with Nora and see how she answers this question before time runs out in the library: What is the best way to live?
