Title: The Graduate

Author: Charles Webb

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 218

Rating: 3.5/5

I picked this one up pretty much on a whim after spotting it in a charity shop because I’ve seen the movie and I thought it was pretty good. Perhaps I’m biased because I saw the movie before reading the book, but I think this might be one of those rare cases where the film is actually superior.

But that’s mostly down to the insta-love between Ben and Elaine, which worked a lot better when drawn out across a movie than it did in the book, where it felt like he just arbitrarily went from hating her to loving her.

Considering that that’s in many ways the crux of the story, you can see why that might have caused a little bit of a problem when I was reading it. I’m not saying that it was a bad book though, it just felt a little bit rushed. It could easily have had another hundred pages and would have still worked just fine.

I’m still glad that I read it, I guess I was just hoping for something a little more from it. But then, it was a debut novel, and for a debut, it’s pretty impressive. Good stuff.

Learn more about The Graduate.