I had very high expectations for this book because the movie is one of my favorites! However, the book fell a little flat for me. For starters, it's too long. A romance/comedy/family drama never needs to be 500+ pages, that is just over the top. I also found the footnotes a bit distracting and they often took me out of the story so I wasn't able to engage. I truly wish the author would have found a way to integrate that more in the story. However, my largest pet peeve is the writing/POV. Switching POV's between paragraphs at times without indication gave me whip lash and often times left me confused. I ALMOST DNF'd this, but I pushed through because I own the box set and want to at least give the 2nd book a go. It's getting 3 stars from me, even though there were some big things I disliked, the overall story was fantastic.