Bring on the Movie Adaptations

Summer is only eight days old, and I'm already back from my big family vacation. My sister got married in Southern California last weekend, so I took a break from my novels' fantasy worlds to visit Orange County's Fantasylands. Now I'm back to my own version of reality—and back to squeezing in work time between hanging out with my kids for the summer.

One of my goals for the season was to make sure I read Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret before the movie comes out this fall. The book initially looked daunting because of its enormous size, but I didn't realize hundreds of gorgeously hand-drawn illustrations accompany the novel. Not only did I sit down and rapidly devour Hugo's story of movie magic and automatons, but I immediately afterward read it out loud to my six-year-old son. Now we're ready for November's movie adaptation (which stars Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, Jude Law, and Chloe Moretz).  I can't wait!

Continuing with the tradition of seeing movies after we've read the books, my eleven-year-old and I will be heading to the last [sniff] Harry Potter film in July, and my husband and I will need to check out the movie version of Kathryn Stockett's The Help.  My husband tends to read whatever I read, so we've formed our own mini book club that includes theater field trips, although he didn't get as geekily excited as I did when I discovered that the movie poster for The Help matches the colors of the book's cover:

So, when I'm not juggling kids and book revisions this summer, I'll be ducking into theaters and contemplating the age-old question: Can a movie be as good as the book on which it's based?

Happy reading, and happy movie watching.