The Midnight Library by Matt Haig; 1,000th Blog Post is About a Captivating Enchanting Library of Lives

 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig; 1,000th Blog Post is About a Captivating Enchanting Library of Lives

By Julie Sara Porter 

Spoilers: Wow, 1,000th blog post! 9 years! It has been quite a ride! I have been a Book Reviewer longer than I have been anything else and I love it! 

There have been so many authors, so many books, and so many stories that I shared. I feel like I have lived thousands of lives vicariously. So it is fitting that my thousandth review should be The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, a Contemporary Fantasy novel about a library that tells of several potential lives of one woman. 

Nora Seed attempts to take her own life. When she wakes up, she finds herself inside The Midnight Library. The librarian, Mrs. Elm tells her that it is filled with books that represent the various lives that Nora lived had she made different choices. All she has to do is choose one and she is transported to become that particular Nora in that particular reality.

This book has an amazing concept with wonderful themes of choice, regret, memory, loss, possibility, personal happiness, and finding one's true path. The library itself is filled with an endless collection of books, lives, that are untitled and unmarked. They seem to convey sameness and monotony, but instead the stories inside provide a variety of lives with different situations, experiences, and memories.

Nora is the right character for something like this to happen (even if her surname, Seed, and Mrs. Elm’s names are a bit on the nose.) Nora works at a music store and despairs over missed opportunities and lost career paths. She has broken romantic relationships and is estranged from family members. Her life is just going through the motions and feeling like she isn't a part of anything. She feels that her life is one of past regret and barely living in the present.

The lives take Nora through various situations. In many ways, this book is similar to the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, which presents another woman entering various realities based on different worlds and choices. The realities come from different initial choices. Then those choices result in other outcomes. Some good, some bad but eventually lead to her becoming a more sagacious and perceptive person because of her experience with them.

Nora becomes a pub owner, animal rescue shelter worker, an Olympic swimmer turned public speaker, rock star, climate change scientist, and philosophy professor among other careers. Her family and love life fill the gamut from single, cohabitating, in romantic relationships, married, divorced, to widowed. Her friends are still in touch, grown apart, connected on social media, lost because of breakups, or are completely out of her life.

She is childless, had various miscarriages, has one or two children. She has plenty of pets, allergic to animals, or had pets that died. Her parents are divorced, widowed, still together, both dead, or out of her life. Her brother is estranged from her, supporting her, acting as her manager, alive, or dead. She can be healthy and destined to live a long life, sickly and dying, physically healthy but suffering from various psychiatric disorders, or caught in a serious catastrophic accident.

It's exhausting and also exhilarating keeping track of the various realities, moving along Nora’s life paths, understanding the changes, and finding out the knowledge and wisdom that she obtains from them. Each reality is different but tells a complete beautiful story of a woman receiving the opportunity to explore all of her potential lives to find the one that fulfills her the most.

That is the secret to the various realities. All of them have positive and negative aspects. One where she is rich and famous could also see her as depressed and suicidal. One where she married an ex boyfriend that she still has feelings for gives her lots of friends but various marital problems. 

One where she travels and sees many great places reveals that she experiences them alone. Another where she works for important humanitarian causes puts her in Nihilistic despair when she believes that nothing will improve. Even when she is in a mostly happy reality, there is something that she lost or gave up on. Even when a possibility leads to negative results, she can find something positive inside it. 

The point of the novel is not to find the perfect life or the life where Nora left the biggest impact. It's to find the possibilities that surround her and in turn us. It's for all of us to recognize the hardships and appreciate the pleasures. To find meaning and existence in living no matter the reality. To find everything instead of nothing. In my case, to find the meaning and possibility that exists in every story. All 1,000 of them.

New Book Alert: The Bookbinder's Daughter by Jessica Thorne; Enchanting Special Collections Library Is Backdrop For Year's Best Fantasy

 

New Book Alert: The Bookbinder's Daughter by Jessica Thorne; Enchanting Special Collections Library Is Backdrop For Year's Best Fantasy

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: Through this blog, we have seen book lovers and collections that have magic, not the traditional kind where a love of reading and a great imagination can send a Reader anywhere they want with the turn of a page. I mean real magic. From books that literally talk to Readers, books that appear to provide answers when someone is at an emotional crossroads, books that pull Readers inside their magical world, literary characters taking breaks from their storylines to hang out and chill with Readers, and libraries that hold every book that has or will be written and where characters congregate between reads and sometimes wait to become characters in a new work or taking over for other characters.

These Book Worlds could be a dream for me and my fellow Bookworms. 

That network of magical libraries and book keepers can add another member: The Ayredale Special Collection from Jessica Thorne's enchanting modern fantasy novel, The Bookbinder's Daughter.

 On the surface, it looks like a typical special library with a learned scholarly staff that know their collection and the knowledge it contains, researchers who come in to study the contents, comfortable chairs, a fireplace, and a very cozy, quiet, and welcoming atmosphere. It seems normal, but it's not.

 Sophie Lawrence knows this. She and her father left the Special Collection after her mother disappeared when she was a teenager. Now, Sophie is an adult whose father has died and she is in a loveless relationship with a verbally abusive boyfriend. She has constant dreams of walking around a tree that reaches the sky and a voice that calls to her. Her only comfort is her job as a bookbinder. She repairs and builds books with the care of a doctor to her patients.

Sophie is visited by her uncle, Dr. Edward Talbot who sends her an official job offer to become a conservator and specialist binder at the Ayredale Special Collection. Because of the trauma of her mother's disappearance and the blocked memories of her time in Ayredale, Sophie is extremely reluctant but as soon as she reenters the library and meets its odd staff, she feels a sense of being drawn in and welcomed. She also feels a surge of energy surrounding the library, something ancient, powerful, hypnotic, and potentially dangerous.

The characters and setting are what makes The Bookbinder's Daughter truly magical. There are so many great touches that enchant and draw the Reader into this spellbinding world of deep magic, knowledge, and wisdom.

Once Sophie enters the Special Collection, it becomes apparent that the collection and staff are one of a kind. The Ayredale staff are an eccentric unique bunch. Many of them practice some form of magic or what they call, The Art.

There's Uncle Edward who comes and goes on a whim always insisting that the "family must always return to the library." Will Rhys, Sophie's childhood best friend has grown into a handsome young man that sees himself as a protector of the library and Sophie. Professor Hypatia Alexander, the Keeper, never misses a thing but is looking for a replacement. Arthur Dee, Will's half brother has an obsession with the darker aspects of the collection. Villus, the library cat has his own sense of self importance. Delphine, one of three young library assistants (the other two are named Hannah and Meera), sets her amorous sights on the available and important men in the library. 

Then there's my favorite character, Tia, a flamboyant and flashy archivist who has a tragic past and powerful abilities behind her flowing red hair, glamorous appearance, and fashionable wardrobe. (Sort of like if Maggie Smith's earlier character Miss Jean Brodie had the knowledge of her later character Professor Minerva McGonagall.) The staff fills Sophie with a sense of welcome with their mostly kind nature but unease as the collection's real value becomes apparent.

And what a value that collection is. There are some very old magic books with a lot of power. One of them has leaves, no not leaves like pages, actual golden leaves written with words. This book is written in a strange language that none of the staff can decipher, except Sophie. Sophie, who has dyslexia and often has a hard time understanding written language, completely understands this book and many others. It appears that Sophie has her own untapped Art that needs to be put into practice. She has been  called to this job by outside forces and she does her job well.

The collection has a history that goes back to John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I's astrologer, advisor, and sorcerer who allegedly knew and wrote about various magical ancient languages. 

If the books aren't enough, there's the very large tree that stands in the center of the rotunda. A tree that contains much knowledge that can be transferred just by looking at it. It's a tree that is familiar to followers of various myths and religions. (Of course since books come from trees, it makes sense that the books and their original source would be together.) The books and tree are now in the care of the Ayredales who protect them from being misused even as they are pulsing with power and draw the unsuspecting, unwary, curious, avaricious, and greedy.

Of course, greed and opportunism set in and the collection is misused and opened wide. Dangerous things happen and many characters are revealed to be something else, something more frightening and deadly. Sophie finds out some truths about her family and the people that she works with and slowly has begun to regard as a second family.

The Bookbinder's Daughter is one of those type of books that draw a Reader in so much that they are immersed in the world and lost in the setting and characters. That magic  makes The Bookbinder's Daughter one of the best books and certainly the best fantasy of 2021.