The Midnight Library
This was a little bit of an interesting read in the sense of “Before the coffee gets cold”. The story starts when the protagonist basically has given up on life and takes her own life (I don’t consider this a spoiler since each chapter starts with how many days/minutes before she decides to end her own life). This then starts a rather magical journey into a quasi afterworld where a librarian gives her the chance to peek at her other lives in the multiverse.
So in one life, she’s a famous singer, in another life, she’s a famous scientist, in yet another life, she’s just a lifeguard. its almost like the butterfly effect, where one decision, or a series of decisions made has huge downstream effects on her life. So in one life she’s pushed into becoming an olympian swimmer by her dad and she just keeps on pushing until she becomes the best in the world, and so on and so forth.
The chapters then go into details about how happy/unhappy she is about her other lives with the caveat that she goes in with the mindset of what she was when she commited suicide. So she’s not really that person, she just gets to live that person’s life at the moment/same age as when she died. So she wakes up as the person in their life, but with the memories and personality of who she was. It makes for a rather disconcerting experience because she’s not really a scientist, not really a famous singer, not really an olympian when she dies. She’s just lucky in that she’s not in the middle of a life or death situation when she appears and gets totally exposed, but it does come close.
The book goes on like this until she finally decides to NOT die and wakes up from a coma. she then gets to undo the stuff that made her wants to commit suicide in the first place and life goes on.
My peeve at the book mostly stems from how basically each life she goes into has its own morality play. it basically shows her that no matter her choices, every life has its own issues, though some issues are lessor because of the life’s success. its basically telling her, there’s no such thing as a paradise because each life has its ups and downs, and you know, yours isn’t that bad. you just have to work harder at it.
I’m not really that down with that message because you know there are lives that do suck. being born into a middle of a war sucks. doesn’t matter how many times you get to redo it. it sucks. same with lots of other situations. if you can imagine that those people have to relive their lives and have nothing good come out of it, or other infant mortality situations,or some such.
I realize i’m nitpicking at the “suspend your disbelief” pieces of it, but this book really did give me a weird bad taste in the mouth after i was done reading it. perhaps if the author had done more to say why such situations happen and in what situations it happen, it’d be better, but probably would just be contrived. for me this is a big skip, but maybe this type of book would appeal more to you. for books of this type, i’d say “before the coffee gets cold” is better.