Dear Nora Seed: What If You Didn't Have to Learn a Lesson?

I finished my review of The Midnight Library and sat with my journal the next morning. I wished someone had been more patient with Nora before she started converting every experience into lessons. So I wrote her a letter, because sometimes the most honest way to examine what a book gets wrong is to offer what it couldn't give its protagonist.

What follows isn't literary criticism. It's what I would have said if I'd found Nora in that library before Mrs. Elm began her guidance, and before the infinite possibility collapsed into the single acceptable interpretation.