Book to Movie: The Kite Runner

I've been anxious to see this movie ever since I read A Thousand Splendid Suns. Of course, I wanted read The Kite Runner first...book lover first and all that. That also means that I don't go into these movies with any expectations, however, I figured that the producers would have to work extra hard to ruin this movie.

Of course, some details were sacrificed for time, but the movie maintained the essence of the book for the most part. The acting here was superb, all of the actors well chosen, particularly the younger actors and especially the young man chosen to portray young Hassan. I'd heard there was quite some controversy regarding the filming of the pivotal scence, but I think that the director handled it with handled with grace.

The tone was the same as the book, you feel the sadness and despair and ultimately the hope. I think this movie was beautifully made. I shed a tear or two.

When I think about the movie, I don't count it as one of the greatest of all time, but it's good. I enjoyed it.

Final Take - 3.75/5

Julie's Review: A Northern Light

Summary: It's 1906 and 16-year-old Mattie Gokey is at a crossroads in her life. She's escaped the overwhelming responsibilities of helping to run her father's brokedown farm in exchange for a paid summer job as a serving girl at a fancy hotel in the Adirondacks. She's saving as much of her salary as she can, but she's having trouble deciding how she's going to use the money at the end of the summer. Mattie's gift is for writing and she's been accepted to Barnard College in New York City, but she's held back by her sense of responsibility to her family--and by her budding romance with handsome-but-dull Royal Loomis. Royal awakens feelings in Mattie that she doesn't want to ignore, but she can't deny her passion for words and her desire to write.
At the hotel, Mattie gets caught up in the disappearance of a young couple who had gone out together in a rowboat. Mattie spoke with the young woman, Grace Brown, just before the fateful boating trip, when Grace gave her a packet of love letters and asked her to burn them. When Grace is found drowned, Mattie reads the letters and finds that she holds the key to unraveling the girl's death and her beau's mysterious disappearance. Grace Brown's story is a true one (it's the same story told in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and in the film adaptation, A Place in the Sun), and author Jennifer Donnelly masterfully interweaves the real-life story with Mattie's, making her seem even more real.

Mattie's frank voice reveals much about poverty, racism, and feminism at the turn of the twentieth century. She witnesses illness and death at a range far closer than most teens do today, and she's there when her best friend Minnie gives birth to twins. Mattie describes Minnie's harrowing labor with gut-wrenching clarity, and a visit with Minnie and the twins a few weeks later dispels any romance from the reality of young motherhood (and marriage). Overall, readers will get a taste of how bitter--and how sweet--ordinary life in the early 1900s could be. Despite the wide variety of troubles Mattie describes, the book never feels melodramatic, just heartbreakingly real.

Review: I believe that Jennifer Donnelly might be my new favorite recently discovered author. While I think that The Winter Rose outshines A Northern Light, it is nonetheless a very intriguing story. It isn't so much the true story that is inter weaved with in the works of fiction, but the fiction story that held my interest. I loved Mattie. I loved her naivety and her soul. I loved her struggle between doing what she promised and making a life for herself. It really wasn't until the end of the story that I was sure what decision she was going to make. I love how Ms. Donnelly made me wait until the last several pages of the novel to tell us the outcome.

I loved the time period that the novel takes place in and the area of the country. I don't know much about the true life story that the book is written around but I could picture The Glenmore clear as the ocean water in my mind. Ms. Donnelly has a way of writing that transports you to the time and place.

I didn't want Mattie to settle for something because it what was normal and expected of her. I wanted her to break out and pursue her dreams. I felt that staying with her dad or marrying Royal would limit her to a life that she really didn't want and truly was too good for. Mattie had choices where as many young women in that day did not. I loved how Miss Wilcox encouraged her. I liked the twist in the story. I loved Mattie's word of the day and think I might need to start that myself to expand my vocabulary.

It did take me a while to get caught up in the story but I'm not sure if that speaks to the book or my CRAZY life right now. I asked Lisa if I should read this one first or The Tea Rose: A Novel, she said A Northern Light. I shall have to ask her why.

If you like historical fiction surrounding real life cases than you will enjoy this one. It's a strong, character driven story; with a very satisfying ending. I still give The Winter Rose a decent edge over this one though because that book hooked me within the first few pages.

Final Take: 3.75/5

Related: Lisa's Review: A Northern Light

Confessions of a Shopaholic on the "Big Screen"

Well, it's here, the official movie trailer for Sophie Kinsella's Confessions of a Shopaholic .

The movie stars Isla Fisher as Becky Bloomwood and Hugh Dancy as Luke Brandon. I'm quite glad they decided on non-American actors for the leading roles (Except they're all speaking with American accents!) ~ the rest of the casting made me do a double take. Becky's parents are being played by Joan Cusack and John Goodman!!! Krysten Ritter is cast as Becky's faithful friend Suze (anyone else have trouble seeing her as anything but Gia from Veronica Mars or Lucy on Gilmore Girls???).

A little out there as casting goes? What do you think?

The movie is currently scheduled to release in February.

Personally, I prefer Kinsella's NON-shopaholic stuff, but I won't mind taking a gander at the film... maybe when it comes out on DVD.

Thoughts from Trashionista: http://www.trashionista.com/2008/12/more-anti-becky.html

Jenn's Review: The Dirty Secrets Club

Summary: An ongoing string of high-profile and very public murder-suicides has San Francisco even more rattled than a string of recent earthquakes: A flamboyant fashion designer burns to death, clutching the body of his murdered lover. A superstar 49er jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. And most shocking of all, a U.S. attorney launches her BMW off a highway overpass, killing herself and three others.

Enter forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett, hired by the SFPD to cut open not the victim’s body but the victim’s life. Jo’s job is to complete the psychological autopsy, shedding light on the circumstances of any equivocal death. Soon she makes a shocking discovery: All the suicides belonged to something called the Dirty Secrets Club, a group of A-listers with nothing but money and plenty to hide. As the deaths continue, Jo delves into the disturbing motives behind this shadowy group—until she receives a letter containing a dark secret Jo thought she’d left deep in her past, and ending with the most chilling words of all: “Welcome to the Dirty Secrets Club.”



Review: I started reading Meg Gardiner over a year ago after reading Stephen King's column in Entertainment Weekly singing her praises. Of course the problem with that was, at that time, Ms. Gardiner's novels were only available in the UK. I am no stranger to ordering from Amazon.co.uk, so I thought I'd order a couple and ~WOW, was I hooked! I ordered all the books in her Evan Delaney series.

Gardiner's writing is... intense, there's just no other word for it. Gardiner is a brilliant linguist. There's no sentence, no word, that's extraneous. (If you're a skim-reader —you know who you are, skimming over paragraphs when things get a little dull— then this author is not for you.) Everything is very tightly packaged, wound with action and suspense. I've never read another author like her.

Infomercial over.

Dirty Secrets Club is the first book in a new series from Gardiner about Jo Beckett. I found this book to be shadow less intense than her series about Evan Delaney, because there is slightly less urgency in forensic psychiatry — slightly — though in this case Beckett is racing against time to prevent further murder-suicides from occurring. The plot was not quite as fine tuned as her other series, but still a dramatic page turner. Although you are introduced to the villains quite early on in the novel (a tactic that sometimes de-energizes a story), things are not always what they appear and there are lots of nice twists along the way.

Gardiner unwraps her heroines slowly, you learn more about them with each chapter and each novel, and Jo is no different. She give you bits and pieces of her, enticing you to read more. I am interested to see how she will develop throughout this series.

I think this was a great introductory novel for this series, and her first publication in the states. If you want a true sense of Gardiner, though, I highly recommend that you start with the Evan Delaney series, now available in paperback here in the US, of which China Lake is the first novel.

I will say this after having scanned through the reviews of this book that are out there, people seem to either love Gardiner or hate her; I fall into the category of the former. Gardiner is far and away, my favorite suspense novelist.

Final Take:  4.0/5.0

Lisa's Review: The Kite Runner

Summary:

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him. ~www.khaledhosseini.com

Review:

After reading, A Thousand Splendid Suns, I put The Kite Runner closer to the top of my To Be Read pile, however it still took a year for me to get to it, because I felt that it would take a toll emotionally and I wasn't wrong. Frankly, there's not much you can say without spoiling this book.

Amir, a privileged young Afghan comes of age shortly before the country becomes embroiled in war. His servant and friend, though Amir could never admit it, Hassan grows up with him. Amir longs for his father's approval and try as he might, seems only capable of getting it for a short while. Tragedy strikes and Amir takes a cowardly route and has to live with that and his subsequent betrayals for the rest of his life. There are some surprises and then you saw some things coming a mile away. I suppose that's to be expected in a story about redemption. Hosseini's use of language and imagery is vivid and emotional and somewhat autobiographical, I suspect!

I'm sure I prefer A Thousand Splendid Suns to The Kite Runner, but it's a slight, indiscernible preference.

Final Take: 4.5/5

Jenn's Review: Don't Look Down

Summary: Lucy Armstrong is a director of television commercials who's just been recruited to finish a four-day action movie shoot. But she arrives on the set to discover that the directing staff has quit, the make-up artist is suicidal, the stars are egomaniacs, the stunt director is her ex-husband, and the lead actor has just acquired as an advisor a Green Beret who has the aggravating habit of always being right.

Green Beret Captain JT Wilder had thought that hiring on as a military consultant for a movie star was a good deal: easy money and easier starlets. Instead he has to babysit a bumbling comedian, dodge low-flying helicopters, and resist his attraction to a director who bears a distracting resemblance to Wonder Woman. Then the CIA calls and he realizes that somebody is taking “shooting a movie” much too literally.

Review: I wanted to read this book because I stumbled across the second collaboration of Crusie & Mayer, Agnes and the Hitman, and loved it. This is most certainly their first co-authored work as it does not have the fluidity of the second. Whereas I found their writing styles meshed well in Agnes, I was far more aware of the switching of voices here.


The novel opens and you feel like you've been dropped in the middle of a chapter. I'm a fan of NOT reading the jacket blurb before starting the book ~sometimes I'll read the blurb before purchasing a new author, but I prefer to let the author's story unfold on it's own with no preconceptions~ but it's hard to do that with this book. It takes a good few pages to get ones bearings (With Agnes the title pretty much gave you the need-to-know plot exposition). I also didn't find these characters as likable as those in their second book nor the mystery as intriguing. It felt like the formula, though contextually far fetched (a director of commercials is called in to finish up the directing a feature film?!?), was laid out a little too early thus making the whole thing a little predictable.


All in all, the read was good fun. I certainly hope that their continued collaboration matures with persistence. I don't know that I'd re-read this one, but it made me want to pick up Agnes and the Hitman again. I recommend you do the same.


3.7/5.0