Hard agree on the saccharine and fluffy comments about this book. I understand why some people can like this and I'm not going to invalidate your feeling about this book if you do feel that way. But some, like the jaded person that i am, can find it cloyingly sweet and kinda gives nothing. My main problem (as a person who struggles with anxiety, depression you name it and can relate to the main character's problem) is that this is a magical realism book where the main character found her will to live AFTER she was shown all of these different (HUNDREDS) versions of her lives and I cannot relate/use that in my life. It's not as easy as gaining perspective and changing your mind-set in order to not be depressed. I cannot just get up one day and decide, for example, oh I wanna go to the Arctic to become a glaciologist because I've always wanted to and I've always regretted not doing that! I won't be able to do that and then found myself face to face with a polar-bear-near-death-experience in order for me to realize Oh actually I wanna live! You know some people are so depressed they can't even get out of bed? Or worse??? And some people's depression is not caused by regrets from bad decisions they made in the past, sometimes they're hormonal or caused by chemicals we have no control over. So it's a sweet thought that you can just gain perspective from a magical event in your near-death experience where you get to visit your other lives, but in real life that is not a thing. You might argue that that is not the point of the book. You should take away the message that Nora, despite being successful in her other lives, were still depressed and unhappy. And her other lives were not perfect either. Which is again... what am I supposed to do with that information? And how is that going to change anything about my own and other people's depression? AGAIN, it's a sweet thought. But it's giving nothing. It's not applicable for everyone, you see what I mean. Sometimes it's not even about not being grateful enough or not having perspective, sometimes it's just chemical imbalance, deep trauma, abuse etc. Things that you literally cannot control / take back / can be erased just by trying to be ~more grateful~.

If I treated the midnight library as a self-help mental health book, it did nothing for me. If i treated it as a piece of fiction that just so happens to have a theme of mental health and a character who struggles with depression, then it still did nothing for me. Overall it was just a mid book.