Hello and happy whatever day it is when this post is coming up. It’s Sunday afternoon as I’m typing this, and yesterday, as I was working out, the trailer for Love at First Sight came up, which resulted in me convincing my family to watch the movie. Now, I’m not really a movie or show girlie, as you might have noticed, but I felt compelled to watch this movie for two reasons: 1) the trailer made it look appealing, and 2) this is the movie adaptation of one of the very first YA novels I read.

I’m going to go ahead and say that the movie adaptation was way better than the novel, which was written by Jennifer E. Smith and published in 2012. Even though most of the elements from the book were in the movie, to the point that my sister mentioned that it was way too long, some aspects were changed, and to me, those were total hits. For instance, the main characters in the book are teenagers, but in the movie they’re in their early twenties. It’s a subtle change, but it makes stuff more believable, especially to those of us who probably fell in love with the novel a decade ago, but now are in our late 20’s and are a bit more cynical.

Both Hadley and Oliver, the main character and her love interest, have complex relationships with their families (don’t we all?), and it’s because of these relationships that they find themselves having to travel from New York to London. They meet at the airport and fall in love during their flight. That’s not a spoiler at all: this a story that you consume to know how things happen, but there aren’t really any surprises, at least not for the reader/viewer. I think the way family relationships were handled in this movie was way more realistic, but at the same time way more comforting than in the book, especially Hadley’s relationship with her dad, which I can’t help but compare with my own relationship to my dad.

I know that I’m being vague, but if you needed a movie recommendation, this is it. Don’t read the book, or do if you want to, but in over ten years way better novels have been published. Besides, like I’ve mentioned, the movie was superior.