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Unpopular opinion: Our club's pick 'The Midnight Library' was actually pretty shallow
I read it after everyone raved, but the 'choose your own life' thing felt like a self-help listicle, not a novel with real stakes. Anyone else feel let down by a book the whole group loved?
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dylan6049d agoTop Commenter
Totally get calling it a self-help listicle, that's a good way to put it. But I don't agree that it had no real stakes. For me, the whole point was that Nora felt every single one of those lives was empty because she was running from her own pain. The stakes were in her finally choosing to face her root life, not in any of the other paths. The library was just the tool to get her there.
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the_cole9d ago
Remember reading a book where the main character kept jumping into different paintings to escape. It felt a lot like what you're saying, dylan604. The whole story was just him avoiding the one messed-up painting that was his actual life. The "stakes" were never about the cool worlds inside the art. They were only in him finally turning around to fix the ugly, broken canvas he left behind. It made me see stories about endless second chances in a totally new way. The point isn't the escape hatch. It's the locked door you have to go back and open.
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