Is it me or did February fly right by? But I did not fly through my reading. I took my time and only read two books, just like January. The first one is The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, which I picked up because I heard it mentioned on a few podcasts and I wanted to see what all of the buzz was about. I would not call this book life-changing, but it was different and it made me think.

The plot is very interesting. It’s about a woman named Nora, who hates her life. That’s not an exaggeration.  She feels like she hasn’t reached her potential and does not think her life is worth living. These feelings lead her to attempt suicide. Instead of dying she ends up in the Midnight Library, which is a sort of limbo. All of the books are different versions of her life based on different choices she could have made. When she picks up the book, she can try out that life.

The story just shows how even minor choices can impact your life in major ways. I found myself reflecting on my own choices that have brought me to the current point in my life. If I decided to do one thing differently (like chose a different college or major), how would my life have turned out? Would I still be in the same place?

That brings me to the major topic in this book: regrets. Nora has a lot of regrets. There’s even a book in the Midnight Library called The Book of Regrets. It’s pretty heavy. As Nora tries out these different lives, her regrets start to disappear. She realizes no matter how cliché it sounds, everything in her life has happened for a reason. That’s something I expected to happen, but it was nice to watch everything unfold. Through this novel I got to see that we don’t need to have all of these regrets and that every day is a chance to start fresh.

The second book I read in February was The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell. This novel is about a father and daughter, Martin and Ruby, with a tense relationship. Martin is the super for an apartment building in New York City. Ruby is a few years post grad and has moved back in with her parents. She is unemployed and in debt. Martin is extremely disappointed by this and views her as a failure.

The whole story takes place in one day with some flashbacks to flesh it out. It is told from both Martin and Ruby’s viewpoints in alternating chapters. The pace was definitely a slow-burn, but I stayed interested because I wanted to know the breaking point at the end of the story. There was an actual party upstairs and it was a key event in the story.

I don’t think I liked any of the characters, especially Martin. I didn’t necessarily enjoy reading his condescending thoughts toward his daughter. It just felt like he rolled his eyes at every little thing she said and did. There were times where I questioned does he even like her?

Then you have Ruby’s friend, Caroline, the host of the party upstairs. She is staying in her father’s penthouse. She comes from a wealthy family, which is something Ruby is very jealous of. Sometimes you could see how out of touch Caroline was with Ruby’s situation (like helping her get a job interview for an unpaid internship). I just found Caroline a little snobby, even though she wasn’t always aware of it.

Social class is the major theme of the story. It affects Ruby’s relationship with Caroline and her father. But the building and its operations are structured by social class too. All of the wealthy tenants in the building live above Ruby and Martin, because they live in the basement. The story just really made me think about income inequality and how many opportunities in life are tied to money even if we try to ignore it.