Silver Linings Playbook

Between Tuesday evening and Wednesday afternoon, I not only read Silver Linings Playbook in its entirety, but searched Netflix, Redbox and my cable company's on demand listings for its movie counterpart. Despite the fact that my husband and I had wasted 106 minutes of our lives watching Ted the night before, I convinced him that it was detrimental to my health if I had to wait even one day to see this film. Lucky for me, he was easily persuaded with nachos.

This is one of those books that, after going to bed only about 10% into it, I was hooked to the point that I woke up thinking about it. Honestly, I was hooked from the first few chapters. This is exactly the type of story I love. Mentally unstable main character, Pat, convinces himself that his life, which is actually a movie directed by God, is going to have that "silver lining" happy ending once he reunites with his estranged wife and is no longer hunted by the curly headed sax good, Kenny G. Enter Tiffany, who, though endearing in some bizarre way, brings a whole new level of dysfunction to the table. As with any book that I read on my Kindle and fall in love with, I will definitely be buying the hard copy of this book.

On to the film version: My husband loved it. Having not read the book, he went into to this with no clue what it was even about and no expectations. He even said he would watch it again, which for him, really means something. I on the other hand, one that ALWAYS likes the book better, had high hopes that it would be fairly close to the story that had me enthralled for its duration. Let me just talk about that part for a moment. While I do like the book better than the movie in nearly every single case I can think of, there have been a number of times that the film and novel lined up so well that I loved both almost equally. A few examples: Water for Elephants, The Notebook, The Hunger Games, The Help and The Time Travelers Wife. On the other end of the spectrum are the movies where the ending was totally different from the book. To the point where it pissed me off. My Sister's Keeper is the first that comes to mind. How can you make a movie based on a book AND CHANGE THE ENTIRE ENDING?! Ugh. With that being said, while I thought this movie was worth watching again, it was not the same as the book. Not even close. Some of the main points in the book were cut completely out of the movie. Some of the most important relationships were changed so drastically that it became a different story entirely.  As separates, they both are great. Because they are, supposedly, the same story, I am absolutely not a fan of the movie. Maybe had I not loved the book so much it would be a different story but that is not the case.

I would recommend this book to anyone that loves to read and the movie to everyone else ;)

Ashley