The Life Impossible | Matt Haig

I so wanted to love this book. I enjoy magical realism and absolutely LOVED The Midnight Library, Haig's previous book. Plus I'm kind of fascinated by paranormal activity. My dad was a true believer — and could do incredible things with a Ouija board — so I come by it honestly. So, after putting The Life Impossible on hold at the library, and waiting months, I had high expectations, even with the somewhat lukewarm review in the NY Times Book Review.

It started out promising. A student of a sad, retired, frumpy and recently widowed math teacher in England sends her an email filled with despair. Her response is a long (very long) story of her experiences that's intended to lift him up to see the possibilities of life ahead of him. The device of this being a response to her student doesn't seem integral to the story, especially since it's so long getting to the conclusion. It does allow the story to be first-person, though, which is important. Did I mention long?

I read one review that said this is a day-read — ha! I read very quickly and frankly I found it a bit of a slog. Grace Winters is left a small home on Ibiza by a woman she met, briefly, many years earlier. The circumstances of Christina's death are a bit fishy, and so Grace travels to Ibiza to check out the house and see if she can figure out what happened and why Christina left her, a casual acquaintance (or so she thought), a house in Spain. That's where the story kind of gets stuck in a wormhole of magical realism that gets rather ridiculous. There's a whole lot of philosophy mumbo (think bumper stickers) coming out of Grace's mouth and that gets old, especially when she also keeps saying she's just a maths teacher who likes facts. Suffice to say that Grace figures out what happened (which stretches the narrative even by MR standards) and stays on in Ibiza to carry on what Christina started.

If you really, really love magical realism, you might like it. The Midnight Library is a much, much better book in my opinion, and in Haig's defense, it's a hard act to follow. This book did make me want to read some of his earlier work.