This book traces a young woman going from wanting to commit suicide, to wanting to live, through exploring some parallel universes and optional outcomes, and learning to let go of regrets. It is certainly not a how-to plot, since the multiverse scenario is fantastical, but it is thought provoking, and makes you want to seize your opportunities after reading it as well. Additionally, the main character here went to college for Philosophy, so lots of great quotes are scattered throughout.

Here are the bits I tabbed to share with you:

• “Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all.”
• “The only way to learn is to live.”
• “You can choose choices but not outcomes.”
• “There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe.”
• “One of life’s rules: never trust someone who is willing to be rude to low-paid service staff.”
• “She learned that undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true.”
• “‘Live begins’, Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.'”
• “It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.”
• “We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

This is a thoughtful, very well written novel about owning our own choices, and it has a feel good ending. I give Midnight Library 5 stars.