The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library reads like a therapist you just started seeing is trying to give you broad, generalized advice and analogies before they get to know your history. This therapist isn't really clear on your grasp of these analogies so they insist on bludgeoning your head with them repeatedly until you're exhausted, exasperated, and reaching for the door. But hey, at least it seems their heart is in the right place? Maybe? Then again, they told you that to solve your depression, you just have to be thankful for the little things in life, to be grateful for what you have, to just shift your perspective, and things will be okay. Even though you initially came in because your lost your job, you brother hates you, your parents are dead, your dog got run over by a car, and your partner just broke up with you. It's easy, just re-frame your perspective a little, silly.

Right after I finished reading The Midnight Library I knew it wasn't for me, but I didn't especially hate it. But the more time goes on, the more incredulous I am about how popular this book is. Like I said, I don't even think that Haig is being disingenuous in his work, but I simply don't understand how it reached so many people. It's a self-help book thinly disguised as a YA-level magical realistic pop lit book. The prose is boring and uninspired. The characters and their conversations are wooden to the point of being comical. At the very least I'm glad that Haig didn't succumb to ladening the story with witty quips and pop culture references to the same degree that a lot of contemporary literature does.

I don't know, I just don't have much good to say about it. The Midnight Library is so didactic with absolutely no subtly that I just couldn't take the message it was pushing seriously. Unfortunately it also has an ending that is not only saccharine, but was predictable within the first 50 pages. I'm glad that some people seem to get a lot out of this one, it just didn't do anything for me. I'm sure that being published in the middle of the pandemic, when many people were experiencing mental health struggles for the first time, was a huge aid in its popularity.