Matthew Quick

Embracing a philosophy that life is a movie produced by God, neural health patient Pat Peoples endeavors to win back his estranged wife by making strategic sacrifices and coordinating their communications through a depressed widow.

A Novel

The Silver Linings Playbook [movie Tie-in Edition]

margo farto

Jane Keal

This is a lovely book. Really interesting take on mental health. 
Does have a couple of spoilers for classic books so be aware of that. 
Overall I'd recommend it, and suggest reading it before seeing the film which I found quite different (though still enjoyable)

Ivy X

just meh....writing wasnt exceptional, plot was a bit boring, and the characters were annoying

Shay Henrion

This book left me feeling slightly uncomfortable.

Irene Alegre

The Silver Linings Playbook or When Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower Grew Up. 

This is Charlie all over. It's been fifteen years since we last saw of him. He doesn't care about Sam anymore, nor Patrick. Now he worries about Nikki. And it's all about Nikki. He has changed his previous Literature teacher for a therapist that happens to be an Eagles fan as well but he still reads a lot of classic books. He also spoils their endings, which is something he didn't do when he was a teenager. His family is a bit different, but strange in its roots. And his only real friend is a weirdo that develops romantic feelings for him. 

Jokes aside, I liked The Perks better. It felt fresher, more natural and spontaneous.

All in all, The silver linings playbook is a good novel. I liked it. And it is more clear and enlightening in its ending. But I only liked it as 3/5, so I guess it will not make my Top Ten.

Ally Gagliardo

Amazing book. I really feel like it changed me. I loved the movie, but the book was just a million times better.

Katelyn Broad

After getting out of a mental institution, Pat Peoples was obsessed with exercise, football, and seeing his ex-wife again. You see, Pat did something, something he does not remember. But Pat is ever the optimist, knowing that somewhere, there will be a silver lining. Pat believes that his life is a movie that was written by God and that things will get better, because movies always have happy endings. 
As the story unravels, he learns that not everything has the silver lining that he's thinking of and that sometimes different good things can come out of the disappointment. 
I loved this book. I found it to be well-written, sad, and yet hopeful all at the same time. The ending did not disappoint and there were a few twists that I personally did not see coming. Pat reminded me of an adult version of Charlie from Perks of Being a Wallflower for some reason. They both have an innocence to them despite their psychological disorders. 
I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys contemporary fiction.

Samantha 

Amy Maddess

shelby

Pat is so brilliant, as is his family. Such a great book, even though it feels like you're reading for so long.

Whitney Leno

A solid 4 out of 5 stars. I work in mental health and I felt like this book did a great job of highlighting with pretty good accuracy. I really liked the characters as well. I am guilty of seeing the movie first and then reading the novel and I do feel like the movie did the book well. 
It would have been a 5 out of 5 but there were times where Tiffany was a bit much at times.

Анастасия Розова

God, did I love the ending! It was so much better, so much more, that the one in the movie. Actually, the movie and the books are quite different. The beginning may seem the same, but then it's not and it's great.
I loved the movie, it was nice, but I loved the book even more.
The story about two fucked-up people with such an amazing ending. Perfect.

This book has pretty much everything that I look for when reading. Everything from the way that the first person mental illness was portrayed to Pat's hopeless search for Nikki was documented made me never want to put it down, and that's a rare thing in books.

The biggest problem that I have with this book is that we never really know what is wrong with him. We know he has some kind of mental illness or issues, and that he apparently takes a ton of medication, but we don't know why or what it does, he doesn't even know. I didn't like that he was portrayed almost like he had a mental disability sometimes, with how he couldn't understand social situations and had really backwards ideas about how they were supposed to happen. Not everyone with a mental illness is mentally disabled or socially stunted, so I was hoping for more clarity.

I also feel like Cliff would act more like a real therapist than one who is also his best friend. It really wasn't a believable relationship to me, because he would be worried about ethics and malpractice in real life, not about the Eagles and being this guys friend. Especially when he downplayed his issues in therapy sessions. He definitely had more problems than what was being talked about and shown.

Finally, I don't understand this preoccupation with God. I'm not sure if that was supposed to just show how delusional they were, or falling on a stereotype of God delusions in many mentally ill patients, but it came off kind of awkward and made me not really believe it. Tiffany also suddenly had these references to God, which didn't seem to fit the illnesses that she had been portrayed as having (depression, histrionic). It's just odd. It's also the biggest reason this didn't get 5 stars. Everything else was pretty spectacular.

The Silver Linings Playbook follows the journey of Pat, who is a mentally unstable 35-year old who has just been released from an in-patient facility. Pat desperately wants to rekindle his relationship with his wife and end their 'apart time' - and with a new therapist, medication, and exercise regime he sets out to do just that.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and the message it gave. 

I think that books regarding mental health - in their typical and a-typical manifestations - are important and should keep being written. I feel as though books giving the message that recovery is difficult but this is not a reason to give up, are not as widely available as perhaps they should be. And therefore I do applaud Quick for what he set out to accomplish. 

However I did have some issues:

Man speed??? I don't understand Quick's reasoning behind including certain sexist comments within the book. They didn't add to the story or Pat's character development. Pat and his physical accomplishments would not have been damaged in any way or form without these comments. So Quick, why?!

So many classic books are now spoiled for me. This one I understand the reason for inclusion. They were important to the key message of the book. HOWEVER, I would at least have appreciated some sort of warning before hand. So many of these classic book spoilers were just dumped on me out of nowhere and the realization of what had just happened definitely made me tear up more than once. (For a full list of the classics spoiled within this book, see my blog post)

The unethical therapist/client relationship I think there other ways that Quick could have developed this story without including the most unethical therapist relationship I have read about in a book. What was worse was the way it was portrayed as completely normal. I've studied psychological practice and know how damaging this sort of relationship can be. 

See my full review at my blog

b.andherbooks

A rare thing happened to me ... I enjoyed the movie more than the book! Actually, this was also a rare instance where I saw the flick before reading the tome, so perhaps I was swayed by my love for the actors.

All that aside, Silver Linings was a quick, thoroughly enjoyable read. I loved Pat People's thoughts on life, his family, his mental illness, and therapy. As a Packer's fan, I also enjoyed reading about the herd mentality that takes over football fans (the Eagles, or Birds, in this case). Matthew Quick used repetive language well in this book, and I will now never forget the saying "trying to be kind rather than being right."

Tiffany was my main gripe; she is much better portrayed in the movie by Jennifer Lawrence.

I'd be happy to discuss if someone has read the book first then seen the movie.

Christina Hufford

** spoiler alert **
           This book ... had so much potential. 

The first maybe third of the novel, I was swept away by the story. The first person POV takes you right into Pat's mind, and the story was just really engaging and heartbreaking and fun to read. Unfortunately, the book kind of ... lost its shit from there. 

By the middle of the book, the routine of going to a football game, going to a therapy session, going to a football game began to really lag; I don't blame the movie at all for expanding the role of the dance competition, as it injected the story with a PLOT. In the book, the plot just meanders along. The dance training, Pat and Tiffany's main interaction, is told through a pace-interrupting montage, which robs the two characters of any fluid, organic character development. We don't really see a lot of Tiffany. The few times she speaks, she's incredibly crass and unpleasant, and the scenes where she and Pat are apparently getting along and growing into friends/potential life mates, are told in that quick sweep of montage! Tiffany is just not developed as a character, so the climax of the story feels overwrought and undeserved. 

I didn't like Danny's character very much either, there were some problematic choices all over that shit. He has an Afro, was once a "rising gangsta rapper", speaks in stereotypical slang, and the moment Pat enters the run down, primarily black neighborhood in which Danny lives, Pat gets mugged and beaten up so badly his leg is broken. It wasn't maliciously racist or anything, just ... lazily stereotypical and uncomfortable problematic, and it took me way out of the story. 

So, overall, when the book began, I thought it was going to be amazing. The beginning is just great, and it had the potential of being something really, really special. But the plot really drags, and wanders around, and there isn't a very clear thread holding the meandering scenes together. Tiffany's character is too undeveloped to be given so much significance in the climax of the book, and so my lasting impressions were rather unfulfilled. There was a lot of repetition, needless scenes; midway through the book Pat suddenly starts mentioning God over and over in a way that takes the character's agency away and doesn't progress the plot. The decision to change the day to day pace of the story by putting in montages and letter sequences destroy the atmosphere the book had previously set up, and by the end ... I don't know. I was disappointed, that the book wasn't everything it could've been.

Rachel

I was pretty disappointed by The Silver Linings Playbook. Like many people, I wanted to read it after hearing how good the movie was and I have to say now is that I hope the movie is loosely base on the book and better. Not once did the author say that Pat Peoples was bipolar, just that he had a mental illness, so I blame myself for letting information about the movie influence my opinion of the book because for most of the book I thought he was suppose to be bipolar and it wasn't an accurate description of it but he isn't just some kind of mental illness that the readers are not told. Pat didn't always have this mental illness either so it is something that is newly effecting him. With that said I disliked how his character thought and talked, almost like he was a pre-schooler, which led me to believe maybe he's mentally challenged now? But no, the book says mentally ill not handicapped. I thought the reason why he went to the "bad place" was obvious from the beginning, I thought what Tiffany was doing was also obvious when it started. I wish more of the book was about his relationship with her while they were training for the dance, the author goes in great detail about the Eagles to the point where its beyond what the reader needs to know, but this part is rushed through. I did enjoy the ending, it is probably the only redeeming part of the book that makes it worth the buy. Finally, I don't understand how people find the book funny, Pat is obviously struggling throughout most of the book and kind of delusional, it's sad, not funny.

Michael Hessling

I have to say I liked the movie better. I did appreciate that everything wrapped up nicely.

The Silver Linings Playbook [movie Tie-in Edition] A Novel

Reviews