The Midnight Library

Three days into 2021 and I've officially finished reading my first book.

So there's a few things about this reading experience that I want to talk about in this review. To start, I had my eye on this book for a long while before I found out that Once Upon a Book Club featured this in one of their monthly subscription boxes. Obviously, I ordered it right away.

Once Upon a Book Club is a monthly subscription book box that features a different book + goodies each month. The idea of the box is that each item you receive relates back to something in the book. Each gift is marked with the page number that you're supposed to open it on! They even leave you little reminders of when to open your gift! This immersive experience was the highlight of reading this book.

The book itself is not quite what I was expecting but I ended up loving it anyway. Main character, Nora is having a bad day, a bad week, a bad year. She can't seem to catch a break. Her brother won't speak to her, her ex-fiance is fine without her, her cat just died, and she lost her job. Yeah, that's the textbook definition of a bad day. Nora decides she really has nothing left to live for.

She decides then that the best way for her to keep living, is to not.

She's fully prepared to die, and her medication was the quickest route there.

But she doesn't die.

She finds herself wandering the massive corridor of a library, run by her favorite grade school librarian. Ms. Elm explains this place is The Midnight Library, created by Nora, for Nora. It's a place of endless possibilities, endless lives that Nora can step right into. These parallel lives are all lives Nora could have ended up in with just one small change in decision. She can choose to try on as many lives as she so pleases, as long as she decides she doesn't want to die. She just has to keep jumping from life to life, book to book, until she finds the one that makes her forget about The Midnight Library.

This book was incredible.

The unique concept really drew me in and kept me hooked from the beginning. Once Upon a Book Club also kept me on my toes, wondering when I'd be able to open my next gift.

This was a wonderful book to start my new year.