I have to start by saying that I was a little nervous about starting this list of books because while I have read many things that have been hyped, generally I read them either before or during the period of time when they started gaining popularity. I have always been a snob when it comes to trying to stay far away from books that have become wildly popular with an enormous group of people. It reminds me of the height of 50 Shades of Grey when everyone around me (who I knew never cared about reading before) started to recommend me the book because they knew I loved to read. Naturally, I balked because I had no idea if their tastes would be similar to mine. That's kind of a bad example, actually, because I didn't even end up liking that book but the sentiment remains. Would I end up enjoying most, or even some of the books I chose for TikTok Tuesday? The only way to find out was to dive in.
The first book I chose was completely on a whim...and because it had the word "Library" in the title. I didn't know anything about The Midnight Library going into it and decided not to do any digging beforehand. What. A. Book. Probably one of the best I could have picked to start this journey of mine because it was on the shorter side and completely took me by surprise. It's about Nora, a woman who has a lot of regrets in life and who is in an especially dark place when the story begins. She's lonely, she's lost her job, and her cat dies...three things that are the tip of the iceberg that is Nora's unhappy life. When she hits rock bottom and decides she might just not want to live anymore, something happens. Another chance. She wakes up in a mysterious in-between place that looks like a library with a woman who she recognizes to be someone who played an important part in her past. She is told that she can pick any number of things to change in her past to see what her life could have been after those changes. If she likes that life enough, she gets to stay. Through the course of living parts and pieces of these other lives, she realizes that some of her old regrets, don't need to stay on her list at all. She learns that maybe, just maybe, she does still want to live.
Overall this was a really hopeful book. It's easy to fall into ruts at different times in our lives, especially when things become overwhelming and it all feels like too much. We begin to hyper-fixate on times in our life that were easier or things that could have gone better if only we had made a different decision. What this book taught me is that even if we could magically visit the past and make these changes, there are no guarantees that they would have made life better in any way. It's better to focus on the here and the now. What we can do to enjoy life how it is, not how it could be. After all, as Mrs. Elm says, "Well, that's the beauty, isn't it? You just never know how it ends."
Rating: 
Worth the hype? Yes.
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