Happy New Year! Welcome back, my friends. I hope everyone had a safe and lovely holiday season. Hopefully, this new year will bring better times for all of us! Continuing with my reviews of 2020’s best books, I have chosen to do Goodreads’ top fiction book of the year, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. And, along with it, I am making an After Midnight cocktail. I hope you enjoy the review and have a great year!
After Midnight Recipe
0.5oz Vodka*
0.5oz Creme de Cacao*
1oz Vanilla Vodka
0.5oz Kahlua
0.5oz Baileys**
Chocolate Shavings
*The regular recipe calls for chocolate-flavoured vodka, but that isn’t sold in any liquor stores near me. So, I used a combination of regular vodka and creme de cacao as a substitute.
**Baileys is an optional ingredient.
In a cocktail shaker with ice, combine all ingredients (except chocolate shavings) and shake for approximately 10 seconds. Then, strain into a martini glass. To finish off, garnish with some chocolate shavings.
For my special ingredient this week, I decided to add Baileys. It’s not a huge part of the story, but Nora’s celebrity crush (who she might know in one reality) is named Ryan Bailey. And, because of the name repeating throughout the story and being one of her constants in each reality, I thought nothing could work better in this drink than Baileys.
And I was right. Honestly, I liked the drink both with and without Baileys. But I don’t drink caffeine, so the overt coffee taste in the original recipe wasn’t my favourite. So, with the Baileys, I found it a little more palatable for me. (Even though I could’ve definitely drank and enjoyed the original.) As always, take it upon yourself whether or not this drink is for you (and if you’ll drink it with or without the special ingredient). Enjoy!
The Midnight Library Synopsis
(from book flap)
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: What is the best way to live?
Review
“It was, she decided, a very good time to die.”
This one is another tough one to write. I’m always a bit skeptical when it comes to books that get a lot of praise and are supposed to be great. And sometimes I am happily surprised when a novel lives up to the hype (The Vanishing Half), but this one unfortunately did not for me. It wasn’t terrible and the writing was quite strong, it just didn’t feel special to me. And, unfortunately, I have a lot more negatives than positives. But, as always, I’ll start off talking about the positives of the novel.
The first positive of The Midnight Library is the characters. There’s only one main character, Nora, but there were quite a few smaller side characters that added a lot to the novel. They all popped off the page and made the story more interesting. Nora herself was also a very relatable character. The way she feels like a failure as an adult is all too relatable, really. I’m pretty sure everyone can understand how it feels when everything just seems to be going wrong and nothing good seems to happen at all. So, it was nice to see another novel that says what so many of us think. Overall, the characters kind of made the novel. They were well written, sympathetic, and relatable.
Apart from that, I have a few other small positives. One, is that I really loved that it had chapter titles. I had to think about how long it’s been since I last read a book with chapter titles when I first opened it! So, it added a little bit of fun to the story for me. And, as with The Vanishing Half, the first sentence of The Midnight Library really stuck out to me. And then the repetition of that line through the first few chapters made it all the more rhythmic and entrancing. Unfortunately, the novel didn’t overly impress me beyond that.
I feel bad saying it since people seem to love it, but it just did not do it for me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was at first. But, I’ve figured out bits and pieces. First, I thought the metaphors were a little too obvious. The repetitive tree metaphor, specifically, was so forced. I get it, life is like a tree and there’s numerous different branches of different choices people could make, you don’t need to tell me every 30 pages. And, beyond that, the librarian’s name is Elm, Nora’s last name is Seed, and another character is Ash… I mean come on.
In a similar vain as the metaphor issue, the novel was very cliché. At one point, Nora, not sarcastically, says, “Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.” There is practically no more cliché line than that out there. Another problem I had is the overall tone of the novel, a lot of the “deep” statements weren’t genuine to me and because they were repeated so much it felt almost like an insult. Your readers don’t need to be spoon-fed the lessons and symbolism of your novel. I also just don’t like when novels over explain themselves or try to force something to be deeper than it is, and this one definitely did. It was a deep novel that talked about intense issues like depression and suicide, but the moral of the story was obvious from the synopsis I don’t need to be told it 100 times.
On that note, and to try and not drag this on too long, my final problem is that it was predictable. I knew what would happen solely from reading the synopsis. I wanted to be wrong and surprised by something, but alas no. Even the hook of potential danger in the library didn’t really play out except for two pages near the end. I was hoping for a surprise ending where the completely obvious thing wouldn’t happen, but again it was a pretty clichéd ending.
OK, I am forcing me to cut myself off there. I don’t want to ramble on too long about predictability and my other problems with the novel. Mainly because it wasn’t necessarily bad. It was an easy read and the characters and story were interesting, so I didn’t hate it outright. I just don’t think it lived up to the hype of being the top fiction novel of the year, but don’t just take my word for it. You never know if something I don’t overly like could be something you love! As I said, it isn’t my cup of tea, but I will recommend it if you’re interested because it was OK, just not perfect. As always, if you do read it or try the cocktail let me know what you think.
My Rating:
Thanks for reading! And, if you read the book or try the cocktail let me know in a comment, on Instagram, or in person (if you know me). Also, if you haven’t yet read my previous reviews, I recommend reading My Dark and Stormy Vanessa, The Glass Hotel Nacional, and Fallen Anxious People if you liked this one!
Teghann
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Reading this for book group (my second time reading) and I wanted a cocktail to go with it. I like your idea, but what could I use instead of cream-based liquors? One of the members cannot have dairy (and lactaid isn’t an option). Or do you have an alternative cocktail idea for this book?
I loved the book, but get what you’re saying about it being predictable. I like predictable sometimes, especially when life becomes chaotic.
Oh my! Turns out I’ve had some website issues and haven’t been getting notified of comments. So, sorry for my late response. A great alternative to the cream-based liquors would be using a liquor of your choice that you enjoy and supplementing the cream factor with an almond milk or other milk substitute! Hope that helps and sorry for the late response.