The Midnight Library - Book Review

 

Vancouver B.C. Library

How often do we wonder how our life might have turned out if we had made a different choice?

The Midnight Library shares a glimpse into the ‘other lives’ the main character could have had. It is an enlightening journey into how each action of ours can send us onto a completely different path, how our words or lack of words can effect someone else and how the most simple act can transform us.

Life is brief but it can be long when it is unhappy, it can fill our heart with important moments or keep us in the dark of denial. Nora Seed is mixed up, she arrives at a place in her life where she gets to try out the lives she had dismissed, she sees that there is no 'one' perfect life. Each one gives us a gift, and the same one has the opportunity to destroy us.

As in our real life, our heart goes with us in each life we choose, it can expand our thoughts or increase our doubt. Our heart will continue to beat, although it is broken. (Tweet This)

This book speaks to the simple life each of us want, it could be on a stage adored by a crowd, or lovingly shared with those who know us best. It depends on us.

The Midnight Library is the setting of our choices, the millions of people we could be, each book balancing on the others, each one with the potential to write the life we want. Each one with the power to make us real.

The quiet made her realize how much noise there was 

elsewhere in the world. Here, noise had meaning.

The Midnight Library

A library (anywhere) is one of my most favourite places, because it offers secrets and the answers, and also the quiet to ponder both. This book is definitely one of my favourites, it makes you think of all the other books that you didn't choose.

Each book balances on the others, each one with the power to make our life real. (Tweet This)

Stay well, stay kind.

(read a book!)

 

 

Surviving the White Gaze: Book Review

In Surviving the White Gaze , Rebecca Carroll writes with harsh, brutal emotion and also with soft and tender recall.

The author, a brown woman details the story of her life showing equal parts courage and confusion. She tells the story of her childhood as an adoptee in a white family in a white town. It is a good introduction for those who have not faced a life of being considered "less".

It is a world best described by someone who has experienced being on the outside for any number of reasons, in this case because of race. Anyone who has felt marginalized by the way they look, will feel akin to the hurt, surprise and determination required to survive. (Tweet This)

Although I did find the constant moving from one city to the next, one best friend to the next, one school and workplace to the next quite exhausting, I feel it did reflect the author's pace towards finding herself. And owning her Blackness. 

When she speaks to the conversations with some characters in her life who basically say that 'they don't see her as any different', it hits the mark. As I too am a brown woman. If you don't see your brown friends as different, does that mean that you can't fully appreciate the path that they have walked? I believe that in some part it does. 

We never know another person's journey, we never know how their heart has been broken, nor how many times. 

This book can be difficult to read because of its raw emotion, Carroll's skin does not fit us all. But it should. (Tweet This)

I recommend this book, because we will all find ourselves within the pages. Either proud in our humanity or shamed in our ignorance. And both are worth investigating. (Tweet This)

  

Stay well, stay kind.

 

 

Thanks to #NetGalley #Simon&SchusterCanada #SurvivingtheWhiteGaze for the advance copy, pub date Feb. 2021