Book Review: Breakfast with Scot by Michael Downing

On a whim a couple of weeks ago, I rented a 2005 comedy-drama, Breakfast with Scot, and was immediately taken with it. The film was warm, charming, comical, and oddly topical for 2005. After watching the film, naturally I looked it up online and found that it was based off a book by the same name written by Michael Downing. After that, it took me all of ten seconds before I had a request out for it at my local library.

I will say, the book differed greatly in many ways from the film I watched, and I maybe thought the film was a little better. That almost never happens for me. I think part of the reasoning was that Downing’s prose was kind of hard to get in a rhythm with, and sometimes I wasn’t even quite sure what he was saying. Still, the story was about a boy who recently lost his mother to drugs, and her ex-boyfriend’s brother, Sam, was named as his guardian in her will. Now, a major difference from the film is not that Sam was gay, but that his partner, and the narrator of the story, was named Eric in the film and Ed in the novel. Not that it’s a huge difference, but you’d think that’s something you’d want to keep consistent.

I did like how most of the details surrounding Scot remained almost untouched from the novel. Scot just really liked to dress in women’s clothing, and in general, more effeminate things. The book was a little more gray about whether or not Scot was gay, and I think I liked that level of ambiguity more. Also, most of the novel was Ed trying to protect Scot from a future of torment, but there was really no outlet or singular path for his efforts in the book. I liked how in the film, Ed (Eric) tried to get Scot into hockey, the ultimate tough-guy sport. That storyline in the movie was easier and more obvious to follow because I know there are plenty of professional athletes out there who have hidden their true identity behind the mask of masculine sports.

Nonetheless, both Sam and Ed took some serious getting used to Scot, but the outcome remained the same: these three strange souls all bonded and became a family without them even fully realizing it. I was glad I got to read the novel that inspired the film, but my heart lies with the film version in this instance, so I’ll likely be revisiting it again in the near future.