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A review by mschlat
Molly's Game: Inside the World of High Stakes Poker by Molly Bloom
3.0
I saw the movie first, and this turned out to be the strange read where I ended up thinking less of the movie AND the book when I finished.
The book is very much a story of personal discovery, as Molly Bloom uncovers what drives her, what can and does go wrong with following her drive, and how she steps into recovery from her mistakes. What makes it more than a standard tale is the setting of the high stakes poker games she runs, but that very interesting setting doesn't really alter the basic narrative. So, if you go into the book because of the poker, you get some satisfaction from the details, but not the plot.
The movie tells the story of a very different Molly: there's an emphasis on the father that is absent in the book, and the cinematic Molly stubbornly follows a moral code that is barely alluded to by the literary Molly. (There's also more of a fall for the cinematic Molly, partly because the movie covers more events and partly because the literary Molly doesn't discuss drug use.)
So I watch the movie (which I enjoyed, but found flawed) and I read the book (which has interesting details the movie lacks, but tones down the compelling narrative), and I end up with two contrasting Mollys and a confusing reading experience.
The book is very much a story of personal discovery, as Molly Bloom uncovers what drives her, what can and does go wrong with following her drive, and how she steps into recovery from her mistakes. What makes it more than a standard tale is the setting of the high stakes poker games she runs, but that very interesting setting doesn't really alter the basic narrative. So, if you go into the book because of the poker, you get some satisfaction from the details, but not the plot.
The movie tells the story of a very different Molly: there's an emphasis on the father that is absent in the book, and the cinematic Molly stubbornly follows a moral code that is barely alluded to by the literary Molly. (There's also more of a fall for the cinematic Molly, partly because the movie covers more events and partly because the literary Molly doesn't discuss drug use.)
So I watch the movie (which I enjoyed, but found flawed) and I read the book (which has interesting details the movie lacks, but tones down the compelling narrative), and I end up with two contrasting Mollys and a confusing reading experience.