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Carol, Todd Hayne’s film adaptation of The Price of Salt, is one of my all time favorite movies. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s incredible performances, together with captivating 16mm cinematography and impeccable art direction, cast a spell—capture so much love and fear, longing and courage. It is a movie of its time�2015, somehow no longer the present; of the mid-century America it so lovingly recreates—and out of time entirely. I have been meaning to read Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel since the day I first saw Carol, and I truly don’t know why I waited so long.

The movie is remarkably true to the book. There is scarcely a scene or image in the film that isn’t here. Remarkably, the Carol and Therese of the film seem simply to have jumped up off the page and into the screen, like the children in Mary Poppins leaping through Dick Van Dyke’s chalk drawing. Carol—somehow warm and cold at the same time; Therese, poised between innocence and disaffection. The film is, of necessity, more economical than the novel, and that economy makes it sweeter, somehow. Lovelier. The novel is gorgeous, but also surprisingly bitter. Carol, in particular, is not as sympathetic in The Price of Salt as in Carol. Her internalized homophobia (to use an anachronistic phrase) is sometimes hard to read. And Therese’s loathing for her department store job, and the almost thoughtless way she draws out her relationship with sort-of boyfriend Richard, mean that the novel’s mood is downcast and a little paranoid almost before Therese and Carol even meet.

The novel does have one element the film couldn’t quite capture: Therese’s coming of age. Her personal growth animates the novel’s last third, making an already many-dimensioned story even richer. Almost more even than the romance, this aspect of the novel balances out the bitterness.