My letter “M” pick for the A to Z book challenge was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig.

This book was amazing. The general premise is that the main character, Nora, has had a run of bad events after a life fraught with setbacks and disappointments. To that end, she’s swallowed a handful of pills and is now hovering between life and death in the Midnight Library, a place where she can check out alternate versions of her life story and choose to live them instead. In this multiverse of possibilities, Nora gets to live varying versions of her life, based on all the choices she regrets having made – or never having made.

We watch Nora live as a champion Olympic swimmer, a glaciologist combatting climate change, the lead singer of a rock band, and other, more simple lives, trying them – and varying romantic relationships – on for size and ultimately deciding they just don’t fit. The lessons Nora learns about herself and her choices teach her valuable and often unexpected things about the power of shaping your own life and weathering personal storms.

All these stories are told in charming, often heartfelt and sometimes hilarious vignettes that richly color Nora’s kaleidoscope of a life. By the end I was solidly rooting for Nora to make the decision she very much needed to make -the decision to live.

This book gets five stars from me, and will keep a treasured place in my memory.