I recently finished The Midnight Library, and I was very pleasantly surprised.

***SPOILERS***

The story is about Nora Seed, and it starts with her death — more specifically, her suicide. What follows is a lovely, touching, fantastical tour through her many alternate universe lives and the lessons she learns therein.

At the beginning, I was a little worried this would go the way of Life After Life, which I hated because there was no ending. The person kept living the same life forever and ever with no resolution. Happily, that was not the case here. There is an entirely satisfying resolution of Ms. Seed’s between-life-and-death-ness.

I’m often hard-pressed to have a lot of emotion over what I read, but I did shed a tear or two during various points of the book. Nora is utterly heart breaking and heart broken. The depression and uselessness she feels is wholly relatable. She goes through the five stages of grief – for herself – very quickly and, more than once, comes to feel that the Midnight Library is bullshit, which is so freaking understandable. If I were ever caught in the between, I would want a direct resolution, not a thousand lifetimes’ worth of maybes.

Could this book have done a little bit more to examine some of Nora’s privilege? Yes. The lives explored and related to us are all very privileged and relatively easy despite Nora’s regrets. I found myself wondering if she’d have learned a bigger lesson or a lesson more quickly if one of the lives we got to read about was harder or on a completely different cosmic scale than where she started, Understanding Nora would always be Nora, there are countless variations of her “seed life” that could have explored privilege in different ways.

But the point of this book wasn’t to explore privilege. It was to make the reader appreciate being alive through Nora coming to realize she wants to live and that she, herself, appreciates being alive. It truly is a “feel good” book, and its goal is to make you want to live and appreciate the life you had. It was a cozy book and an easy read. I made my way through it in a little over 8 hours.

If you’re looking for something to share a pot of tea with, this book would be a fine choice.