Ratings48
Average rating3.5
This book got a little better but it was so fantastical that it became ridiculous. Forrest's careers read like a child wrote this book. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” “Astronaut!” “Football Player” “Rockstar!” Part of what made the movie so wonderful was that you legitimately believed that Forrest had the ability to make these wonderful things happen. This was absent in the book. In fact, as I'm writing this review I'm decreasing my rating from three stars to two stars.
First - as you can gather from the other reviews. The book is not the movie... the characters are the same (more or less) but the movie takes a bit of the gist of the book and spins it in a whole ‘nother direction and one that pleasingly incorporates all those iconic images from each era.
The book plays out as a series of vignettes that are thinly strung together. Forrest bounces from situation to situation (some you'll recognize from the movie). The vignettes are sometimes satirical, sometimes social commentary, and sometimes just plain silly. The language is at times a little difficult to stomach - but Forrest is a character that comes from the pre-civil rights south, and an idiot savant to boot - so, the language is part of the character and the era.
It was a quick read. I enjoyed this, for the most part - I did laugh out loud several times while reading it. It's enjoyable - but won't be shelves among the favorites that I re-read. I gave it 4 stars - because it's not quite a 3. I'd give it a 3 1/2 stars if I could.
Now I'm going to go pop some popcorn and watch the movie (which IS one of my favorites).
This was another book that I found at a library sale that I never knew was a book. I have watched the movie several times and really liked it so once again I went into this book expecting it to be very similar to the movie.
While the book and movie had many similarities with some slight differences there was some things that started happening about halfway through the book that were just weird and made no sense whatsoever to me.
The way Forrest is portrayed in the book could come off as very offensive to people who suffer from the same mental health issues.
I really just don't know what to say about this book. I went into it with high expectations because I loved the movie so much but unfortunately this was just a big disappointment.