“9 Perfect Strangers” by Liane Moriarty
Published: 11/6/2018 by Flatiron Books
Genres: Novel, Thriller, Psychological Fiction
I watched “9 Perfect Strangers” on Hulu and mentioned it to my aunt who is an avid reader. She told me that she had gotten the book by Liane Moriarty from the library and couldn’t finish it before the due date, which never happens to her. She said that it was a terribly boring book. I glanced through a few reviews and many people said that while others claimed it was “her best work yet!”
The vastly different reviews intrigued me so I decided to read the book to see for myself. There are a lot of characters and none of them are particularly interesting. They are very average people, each faced an extraordinary circumstance, and now feel like they need to go to a health resort to change their lives so they book a 10 day retreat at an expensive health resort called Tranquillum House. Where the owner of the resort uses unconventional protocols to change the guests lives.
The book is very different from the show like the show should be labeled as inspired by the book not based on the book. The characters names are the same and that’s about it LOL.
Spoiler alert I am going to compare the characters in the book vs the show.
Masha, in the book, is an overweight, overworked executive who suffers a heart attack and dies for a short time before being revived by paramedics. After her near death experience she is inspired to go on a wellness journey leading her to open Tranquillum House, an upscale health resort. In the show, Masha’s near death experience is caused by her getting shot in a parking garage. While she is an executive she was never overweight in the show.
In the book Masha lost a son not a daughter and while she thinks of him when listening to the Marconi family talk about their loss she does not obsess over it as she obsesses over the loss of her daughter in the show.
Masha completely loses her mind in the book, but in the show it appears she maintains control the entire time.
Masha’s employee, Yao is a wellness consultant in both the book and the show. He came to know her because in both he was the paramedic that helped save her life. In the book he is loyal to her and he adores her, but in the show they have a sexual relationship.
Francis is a writer who gets taken advantage of by an internet scammer and that has her messed up and in addition her latest book was rejected. It is interesting that this is the character that Moriarty chooses to spend the most time on. Francis’s story is pretty much the same between the book and the show. Where her story line differs is in her relationship with Tony. In the show they start their relationship while at Tranquillum House, but in the book they don’t get together until after.
Tony is an athlete that was forced out of his sport after an injury. In the book, he’s just depressed and looking for something to help him through it. In the show he is suffering with addiction.
The Marconi family, Napoleon, Heather and Zoe, is pretty much the same in the book as in the movie, but Masha isn’t as obsessed with them in the book as in the show. In the show it comes out that Masha handpicked this family and even gave them a discount so she could use them to connect with her daughter. However, in the book Masha has no idea why the Marconi’s are there until they share their story of the loss of their son, Zoe’s twin brother, with the entire group.
Zoe Marconi develops a relationship first with Francis and then with Ben and Jessica in the book, but Lars is the one she gets closest to in the show.
Ben and Jessica go to the resort to fix their broken marriage post lottery win in both the show and the book, but in the book Ben expresses that his biggest issue is that he doesn’t recognize Jessica’s face. She changed everything about her appearance after they won the lottery and all Ben longed for was everything the way that it was before. In the show they save their marriage, but in the book they do not and Ben ends up connecting with Zoe.
Lars is a journalist in the show with the goal of exposing the questionable protocols. In the book, Lars is a family lawyer who is a health resort junkie. He goes to Tranquillum House to get some space from his partner of 15 years, Ray, who wants to have a child.
Carmel is the character most different in the show than the book. In the book Carmel is a woman whose husband fell out of love with her and is now seeing a younger woman making her feel insecure. She attends the health resort to lose weight. She’s actually quite a boring character, but she plays a key roll in getting the group out. In the show, Carmel is at the resort because she wants to lose weight, but her underlying reason for being there is because she knows that Masha had an affair with her husband. While she is there she threatens Masha and we find out that she is the one who shot her in the parking garage the day Masha’s life changed. In the show, we are not supposed to like Carmel because she’s the bad guy, but in the book I very much liked her post transformation.
Things that happen at the resort are very different in the book vs the show which totally makes sense because it would have been a very boring show if the characters couldn’t interact for the first few episodes. I think the whole Masha being threatened and making Carmel the villain was an interesting choice for the show. I thought that Masha in the book was a pretty awesome villain.
One thing that I really liked about the book that show lacked was a good wrap up of what happened to the characters after Tranquillum House. The characters really did change and I don’t feel like you understood that fully from the ending of the show and the changes that you saw, specifically in Ben and Jessica’s case, were not in line with their characters at all.
In the book, I feel like the characters got the endings that they deserved. Even Masha. I also think we missed out on an important insight into Masha’s character in the show, because we didn’t really get to know much about her life before her near death experience. In the book we got to learn about all three of Masha’s lives, her life as a wife and mother, as an executive and finally as a health and wellness expert. We really missed out on a big part of her character development by not learning about her life as a wife moving to a new country from Russia with her husband and her two sons.
So I can honestly say that there are parts of the book I liked better than the show and parts of the show I liked better than the book. Both started off slow, the book dragged more than the show, but the character development was better in the book. I think Moriarty does a good job of colorful writing even when the story itself is kind of boring. She has a gift for character development even when you can’t really connect with any of the characters. I would say if you’re interested do yourself a favor and read the book and watch the show. It really doesn’t matter which you do first. As I mentioned this feels like two different stories.
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