The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Viking, 304 pages, $26

“The Midnight Library” is not a mystery.

I have been reading more non-mysteries and magazine articles lately, mostly non-fiction stuff. That’s why this blog has been empty lately.

What is “The Midnight Library,” then? (More and more books defy categorization, and I say “Yay” to that.) What if you despaired of your life and decided to end it one night. What if instead of dying, time froze at midnight and you found yourself in an unusual library instead. What if the librarian were one from your grade school, a woman who had comforted you once when you desperately needed it. What if she gave you the chance to go back and live another life-that-could-have-been. What if you chose, for example, to marry the man you had run away from two days before your wedding. What if there were more "what-ifs." What would those lives have been like? What kind of book would that make “The Midnight Library”?

Science-fiction, fantasy, “literary,” just another one of the current crop of books that play with time and the meaning of life? It doesn’t pretend to be real. There’s no life-on-the-streets reality. Or family members messing each other up for generations. Or surviving an airplane crash. Or trying to stop a bomb from exploding.

It doesn’t really matter, does it, what label I give it.

It has a philosophical backbone and story-ribs jutting out from there. There is an abundance of emotions. So choose your own adventure, failed human Nora Seed, and author Matt Haig will take us along with you.

This book was pleasant, not too taxing on the brain, and slipped silently into the “feel good” category.