Derek's Reviews > The Silver Linings Playbook

Excellent novel. You have to be willing to settle in with a first person narrator who is way beyond unreliable; he is deluded and naive, divorced from reality. He has blocked out the memory of the traumatic event that sent his life off the rails. He is getting acclimated to the real world after being in a psychiatric hospital for longer than he is willing to believe. In spite of all this, it is a light-hearted and humorous book; not just because he is so innocently bewildered, but because the rest of the world is bonkers in it's own way. His family and friends are mostly football fanatics, and most human interactions are superceded by attachment to the team and their games. Nevertheless, this is not a story about football. It is about how everyone is crazy in their own way. I loved the movie. I will have to watch it again to examine the decisions made in the course of adaptation. The elements are mostly the same, but they were jumbled and trimmed and whipped to a great degree in the writing of the screenplay. Both versions are great. The book has the advantage of letting you live in the main character's head for quite a while... if you are up for that wild ride.