It is so ironic that this Bloganuary prompt came on the same day that I finished reading this book. If you read my last post, you probably know that my new year had a rough start. I picked up this book that has been on my TBR for a long time now. Reading the book and the protagonist’s journey felt like I was reading about myself and honestly, it felt good to know that I wasn’t the only one who had such thoughts and felt these things.

Plot: Nora feels lost and filled with regret at how her life turned out. After her cat dies, she decides that she is no longer needed by anyone and decides to kill herself. But instead of dying she finds herself in a library where the shelves are filled with infinite books based on the infinite lives she may have had if she had made different decisions. These lives all link back to her regrets across her life. She must travel through each life to find a life that she deems fulfilling and worth living.

Review: Most adults are filled with regrets about the many choices that they made throughout their life. We wonder how our lives would have turned out if we would have taken different paths at different decision points. This wondering is intensified during our low days when things aren’t going that well for us. I related so much with the character’s feelings and thoughts throughout the book. I related with her dark thoughts, her agony and just overall her personality. I almost felt like I was reading a story about myself. And as the story progresses you see her changing view point and her gaining hope and it gave me so much hope amidst all the negativity going on in my head. The author’s writing was easy to read yet beautiful. It isn’t one of those books where you get tired of reading because the story is just too heavy. It has been written to make it easy for everyone to enjoy the profound knowledge that the author is trying to pass on.

Verdict: Love the book. 10/10

Shop the book here.

If you are going through a rough patch or are mentally low, this book will give you so much hope. I definitely recommend this to all the other adults struggling through life and wondering about your life choices.

Here is a section from the book that I love –

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.
It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.
But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

Before reading this book, the last book that had a big impact on me was the cliched book – ‘The Alchemist’. I love that book. Has a book changed your life? What are you reading currently?

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