This book was recommended to me by a customer. I found it on my wife’s bookshelf, so I decided to give it a whirl. I’m currently bogged down on another book, so I decided to give it a shot.
Nora is not a happy person. As is revealed early on, she is in her mid 30th, she has lost both parents. Her brother doesn’t talk to her. Her best friend moved to Australia. She doesn’t love her job or her apartment. She left her boyfriend at the altar. She got home and found her cat dead in the street. The next day, because she was struggling to deal with the death of her cat, she was late to work and she was let go. She then even lost her one piano lesson student.
She realizes that she has nothing. All she has done is created misery and disappointment for everyone she has ever known, so she decides to down the bottle of her anti-depression pills and go away. She leaves a voicemail for her brother, post a vague goodbye to Facebook and writes a suicide note.
She then finds herself in a library. Rows and rows of books. And the librarian is he old school librarian, who broke the news and comforted her when her father died.
She is first given a book of all of her regrets. It overwhelms her. All of the things she feels are mistakes she made in her life. She is then given the opportunity to see what her life would be like if she had not made that choice. The library is full of books of her life based on every decision she has ever made.
She starts with not breaking up with Dan. Well, everything was not rosy, and as she realizes that this life is just as disappointing, she returns to the library, to make another choice.
The books follows her through undoing her regrets. And there are unexpected consequences along the way. A choice where her dad does not die of a heart attack leads to her parents divorcing and her mom falling into depression. not quitting her brothers band makes her famous, but he succumbs to a drug overdose.
I don’t want to give it all away. Unfortunately, it end exactly as I thought it was. More a fable than a novel. Everything about it felt a little thin. Each life she went to was done quickly.
I recently read 11/22/63 by Stephen King and part of that was about going back and trying to change things and realizing it never works out. That had a lot more depth and heart and feeling.
This just really felt thin to me. I get the end point. Just you really know where its going and its just kind of there. It was fine.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
5/10
Colin Reads 