Read the book!

Rating: 4/10 (10 September 2008)

We had rented the movie a few weeks before, and while a few parts did jerk a few tears out (no biggie, a lot of commercials can make me cry) I pretty much hated the movie. The characters had no depth, no real emotion. Holly seemed more bored and inconvenienced at her husbands funeral than sad, she had one major break down in the beginning and then the rest of the movie (from what I can remember between naps) was her and her girlfriends going off on escapades that her husband instructed her to partake in via monthly letters that he left her. The letter thing seemed like a horrible, horrible idea to me in the movie....like how do you ever accept someones death when they are somewhat still alive to you by getting a monthly letter from them? What will happen once the letters stop? But the book was so different from the movie, which in comparison was so...crass. The book had real emotion, real feelings...I cried several times reading the book because you could feel for Holly, you could identify with her grief and her happiness and her guilt for feeling happy, her nothingness, her hope, her lack of hope, her inability to even get out of bed some days. Somehow the letters seemed to work much better in the book, I viewed them as one last keepsake, a slower way of letting her still hang on to her husband in the year that she needed him the most, it was a way for him to teach her to live on without him over the course of a year, rather than learning this all at once. While doing much better with a job and new friends by the end of the book and nearing the one year mark since his death, she was still obviously absolutely lost without her husband and her mix of good and bad days reflected that in the book.
Her friends and family were also much more loving and sympathetic in the book, but they also had their own feelings. You could identify with her friends hurt feeling when Holly wasn't supergeeked about her friends upcoming wedding and her other friends pregnancy knowing that they were embarking on lives that she no longer had.....but at the same time you could totally see Holly's side of it that just because it had been almost a year and she appeared to be doing better, it was all still very raw and still hurt and while she was happy for her friends, she couldn't stop feeling the pain of jealousy that they were experiencing happiness that she didn't have anymore, or at least wouldn't have again with her husband. What Holly went through was the very real, very true emotions of losing a loved one. Once the funeral is done and when you appear to have begun to pick up the pieces, people think you are fine, they think you have moved on because they have, because that persons death, while sad to them, doesn't affect their daily life as much, their every waking second. Their life wasn't altered 100 times over by the loss, so they forget the pain you are going through.
I almost want to pick it up and start reading it all over again. It is a good book on its own, but after enduring the pain that is watching the movie, it makes the book that much better. If you like to read, do yourself a favor and check out this book. I will definitely be looking for the other books Cecelia Ahern has written. And to think she was only 21 when she wrote that book and to my knowledge had not experienced the loss of a husband or significant other....but I think she HAD to have experienced some kind of loss, either that or she can somehow very easily identify with how someone must feel in that case.