Raegan Revord reflects on The Midnight Library, where protagonist Nora discovers that alternate lives aren't easier, just different. Each path has its own struggles. The key insight: there are no easy paths, only different ones.
This time on books that changed my life. I think it is easy to imagine there are easier paths, she said, realizing something for the first time. But maybe there are no easy paths. There are just paths. That sentence summarizes this book entirely. Like, I do think, like, sometimes a path might be viewed as easier because you're a billionaire or something, or you don't have this hard of a life or something. But everyone's gonna have struggles, and everyone's gonna have things that they go through. And that's what this book is about, is Nora is seeing these other lives where conventionally, that's an easier life. But then whenever she's living it, she's realizing this other me has these struggles that I don't have. This other me goes through this that I don't understand. And it's slowly teaching her that, like she said, there are just paths. They're different. People go through different things, but each Nora is going through a different thing. And I love that. I love that there are just paths.
