CYNTHIA D. BERTELSEN

A few weeks ago, on the strength of a rather glowing review, I added Matt Haig‘s The Midnight Library to my bulging Kindle library.

And although I never read books in the fantasy genre – well, I DID read Like Water for Chocolate once upon a time – I could not stop reading Haig’s bestseller, which spent at least ninety-seven weeks on the New York Times‘s bestseller list.

Me, reading fantasy? And finishing it? Get out of here!

This in itself amazed me, that I stuck to it, reading it from cover to cover over the course of several nights. And spending the day thinking about it in between, too. During the COVID pandemic, I couldn’t read with full attention, as my ability to concentrate vanished like a cloud of steam escaping from a heating grate on a cold winter morning.

Poof.

For a lifelong reader like me, my inability to read became quite worrisome.

The Midnight Library restored my faith, my reading faith, that is. Though it also refueled my desire to be more contemplative as well, as the book is filled with philosophical observations on what it means to be alive and sentient.

After the first page, I fell into Haig’s story of the unhappy Nora, an English woman stuck in a going-nowhere life in a small village where nothing ever happened. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that Nora takes steps to change her life.

She tries on different lives, thanks to a fantastical library and a wise librarian.

If you’ve ever had regrets about your life, wondering what might have been, asking yourself “What if I’d done that instead of this…?”, then you may well want to grab a copy of Haig’s book.

Please let me know what you think about it if you do read The Midnight Kitchen.