Midnight Library is the Most Mid Book I Have Ever Read

Warning: This review includes spoilers but the book is so predictable that unless you want zero spoilers, this is fine. (Also, at the end, spoilers for It's a Wonderful Life)

1. First and foremost, I felt that because this is the story of a character who made the decision to die, arriving at the Midnight Library and being able to go on all of these adventures romanticized the idea of suicide and put it lightly when in reality this is a very serious situation. This goes along with my next point of how predictable the book is, but since she gets to go back to her life at the end, it just doesn't show how serious her decision to die was. She only came back because of the magical realism part of the book that does not exist in real life. I understand the counter argument of how showing that after everything she got to experience, she realized that the best life for herself was her original one and it tells people that they can change their own lives and make it better, and I think it is a valid point. However, although the reader who finishes the book will know that, Nora at the beginning didn't know. She had to go through the fantasy to figure that out, a luxury people in real life don't get. I just think the overall message was a little contradictory.
2. Secondly, this is one of the most predictable books I have ever read, but for very unique reasons. I picked up this book basically already knowing what would happen at the end. Due to it's nature of talking about suicide, I knew from the beginning that the only way this book could end with a positive and, let's be real, publishable message is if she went back to her original life. If she just died at the end, as she would have if it was real life, then the book would have a hopeless message that no one picked this book up for. If she decided to live in one of the other lives, it would be even more problematic because she would have just learned that the version of her life she was living in was hopeless, so she decided to pick a life that could have been hers but she never did anything for it to be hers except choose to die and would once again be telling a problematic message, which, if the book wasn't so predicatble, is the message for most of the story. The only way it could end with an acceptable message that had some hope in it, is if she went back to her original life, now with the knowledge that she was the master of her fate and she can make that life whatever she wants it to be. And I have to give credit where it is due: I think the ending was very well executed and was the best ending that Haig could have written given the situation Nora and her story was in at that point. I understand that there are all of these reasons for the book to be so predictable and that by its nature it was the only possible ending, but it kept me very unengaged to the story, which brings me to my next point.
3. This is one of the most repetitive books I have ever read. Once again, by its own nature, it was expected that it would be repetitive. However, when you already know what will happen at the end and the same formula is repeated about in about thirteen hundred chapters, the book begins to drag. When I requested this book out of the library (thank goodness I did not spend money on it), the librarian told me I would probably get it soon because it is such a fast read, reiterating what I had heard in those BookTube videos, but I sincerely think I got it so fast because people were turning it in without finishing, because this is one of the slowest reads of my life. I spent around a month on it. I will admit, I am a very slow reader, but when you consider that I read Twilight in four days and I read The Midnight Library, a book with two hundred pages less than the former, in a month, the descrepency is clear. I would love to discuss the pace of this book with someone who read it quickly because I genuenly don't understand. I had so much trouble getting through this book, it left me in a reading slump. Every chapter was the same thing: Nora brainstorms a new life, Nora starts that life and tries to understand what's going on, Nora finds something out about herself and/or her relationships, Nora begins to get tired of this life, Nora goes back to the library, repeat. And yes, I understand that it is repetitive because the whole point is that she is trying out new lives, but I think it is a red flag for a book when I could have skiped from the first life she tries, to the last life she tries, then skip a bit more so I don't have to read some weird stuff that I don't even really remember because I blocked it from my memory to the last chapter and still feel like I read the whole book and know exactly what happened.