The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

I have never watched The Silver Linings Playbook and had no idea what it was about, except that it was a sort of romance between two mentally ill people who are more than they appear, and that there's a very popular clip from the movie of Pat throwing a book out the window. So with those two pieces of knowledge, I dove in.

Pat is from a New Jersey town with a working class father and a stay-at-home mother. He has just returned from The Bad Place, or a psychiatric facility, and he is not 100% sure why he was sent there or how long that it's been. He thinks that his life is a movie being produced by God (a romance, specifically, it seems) and he seems to feel that it's high time he got the happy ending that is his due, specifically being reunited with his estranged wife, Nikki.

This book kind of reminded me of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, in the sense that the hero's mental illness makes him an unreliable narrator in his own story and you kind of have to sift through the pieces to figure out the reality of what's really going on. I also feel like it takes a very sensationalized look at mental illness and there's an almost childlike element to the narration, which often makes the hero feel closer to a teenager than his actual age (thirty-five).

I did ultimately like this book. I especially liked Tiffany, the love interest, who has her own problems. She's a difficult heroine and at times she almost but not quite feels like a manic pixie dreamgirl. I like that the author sidestepped this too-easy trope by giving her agency and her own backstory and some, honestly heartbreaking, motivations for behaving the way she does. That said, I'm not sure this is a book I'd recommend to everyone, as the hero is "unlikable" and does some things that are very uncomfortable and sometimes pretty cruel, even though the book provides context for why he does them. It's not a particularly happy book but it does have a happy ending and by the end, I cared about these characters a lot.

3.5 out of 5 stars