Page to Screen: In Her Shoes

Yesterday, I reviewed the book In Her Shoes. Today I’m going to review the 2005 movie based on the book. This review assumes that you have read the book and may have spoilers for the book/movie if you haven’t.

I thought the screenwriter did a good job of adapting the book for the screen. The book is really long and a lot had to be trimmed and condensed to make the movie, which still ended up being two hours and eleven minutes long. I thought the choice to leave out Maggie going to Princeton was a good one – I found that part of the book to be unrealistic anyway.

I agreed with most of the casting choices. The main casting choice I didn’t like was Cameron Diaz as Maggie. The scenes where she is trying to read a book to a man in the nursing home she works in are awful. I didn’t find her believable as someone who has a learning disability. Actually, I don’t think she’s that great of an actress in general.  I know that some people thought Toni Collette was too thin to play Rose, but I wouldn’t have expected them to cast a plump actress. Unfortunately that’s just not how Hollywood movies work. Shirley MacLaine was wonderful of course – she was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Ella Hirsch.

Incidentally, when Jennifer Weiner spoke at the BEA Bloggers convention, she mentioned that she was really happy with how the movie had turned out. She strikes me as someone who would let the world know if she wasn’t happy with it so I think she was telling the truth. It’s always nice to hear that an author is satisfied with the screen adaptation of their book – it must be hard to let go of control over your characters and story.

If you liked the book In Her Shoes then I think you will enjoy the movie as well. I think fans of romantic comedies will enjoy this movie even if they haven’t read the book.

Buy or rent this movie at:
Amazon Instant Video

Book Review: In Her Shoes

In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Meet Rose Feller, a thirty-year-old high-powered attorney with a secret passion for romance novels. She has an exercise regime she’s going to start next week, and she dreams of a man who will slide off her glasses, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she’s beautiful. She also dreams of getting her fantastically screwed-up, semi-employed little sister to straighten up and fly right.

Meet Rose’s sister, Maggie. Twenty-eight years old and drop-dead gorgeous. Although her big-screen stardom hasn’t progressed past her left hip’s appearance in a Will Smith video, Maggie dreams of fame and fortune — and of getting her big sister on a skin-care regimen.

These two women, who claim to have nothing in common but a childhood tragedy, DNA, and the same size feet, are about to learn that they’re more alike than they’d ever imagined. Along the way, they’ll encounter a diverse cast of characters — from a stepmother who’s into recreational Botox to a disdainful pug with no name. They’ll borrow shoes and clothes and boyfriends, and eventually make peace with their most intimate enemies — each other.

From the very beginning of this book, I had a hard time liking Maggie. The way she treats Rose is just awful. Because of that I had a hard time understanding why Rose was so forgiving and patient with her. Maybe I don’t understand that kind of sisterly relationship because I don’t have a sister myself. Or maybe I’m just cold-hearted! I also thought both characters could have been developed a little more. They both change a lot over the course of the book but I didn’t feel like the impetus for the change in either of them was explored enough.

I especially liked the scenes that took place at the retirement home. I thought Mrs. Lefkowitz, a blunt and spunky eighty-something year old retiree, was really funny. Overall, I found In Her Shoes to be an enjoyable feel-good novel.

I listened to the audio book version of In Her Shoes which is narrated by Barbara McCulloh. I thought she did a great job with the narration. She had an upbeat, almost sassy style of reading that fit perfectly with the tone of the book. This book is a good choice for listening to in the car.

Buy this book at:
Amazon Kindle Store Powell’s Books

Book Review: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jenny Lawson, also known as The Bloggess, has compiled several stories from throughout her life into a hilarious memoir. If you read her blog, then you already know that she has a unique perspective on the world and that is what makes her telling a story a million times funnier than if a “regular” person had told that story. She’s incredibly honest and not afraid to show her vulnerabilities. She writes openly about her struggles with depression and anxiety disorder and even manages to make those stories hilarious too.

I don’t think you need to be a reader of The Bloggess to enjoy this book thoroughly. I had only become aware of Jenny’s blog a couple of months before reading this book (I know, where have I been??) and I still loved it and loved her by the time I finished it. It’s one of the few books where I truly laughed uncontrollably out loud while reading, to the point of tears. One night when I was reading in bed, my husband moved to the couch to sleep because I could not keep myself quiet! I also embarrassed myself on an airplane while reading this book.

I had the pleasure of hearing Jenny speak at the BEA Bloggers conference and she was just as funny in person. And so charming; it’s easy to see why her blog has such a big following. But even if you don’t follow her blog, you should read this book, especially when you need a good, deep belly laugh.

Buy this book at:
Amazon Kindle Store Powell’s Books

(I received this book courtesy of the publisher.)

Third and Final (for me) Day at BEA

My third and last day at BEA started off with the Children’s Book and Author Breakfast which was hosted by Chris Colfer, otherwise known as Kurt from Glee. The other authors who spoke were John Green, Lois Lowry and Kadir Nelson. My primary reason for attending the breakfast to hear Chris Colfer speak so I’m going to focus on his remarks. He has a children’s book coming out in July called The Land of Stories: The Wishing Well.

Chris spoke about how he has been writing and illustrating this book since he was ten years old. He even showed slides of drawings he had done for the book in elementary school and then the same drawing as redone and interpreted by the book’s illustrator, Brandon Dorman. I thought it was really neat that this was not just a book Chris had written to capitalize on his celebrity status but a real life long dream of his fulfilled.

After breakfast, it was another long day of trolling booths and meeting with authors and publicists. I had my picture taken with Tim Gunn for my mother’s sake – she loves him a lot.

I had David Thorne sign his new book, I’ll Go Home Then, It’s Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails. for my husband. I told him that my husband is also a graphic designer so he really enjoys David’s emails about people wanting free graphic design work and of course the Missing Missy poster. (I still cry with laughter every time I read it.) David said that a lot of designers liked his first book; he did not seem taken by my gushing. His inscription reads, “To Travis, Sorry about writing in your book. David Thorne.” He’s crotchety but I love him anyway.

I also got signed copies of Naomi Wolf’s new book Vagina, which comes out in September (and just mentioning it here is going to get me all kinds of nasty spam. You should have seen all the disgusting spam comments I got when I reviewed Winter’s Bone) and Jonathon Tropper’s new book One Last Thing Before I Go, which comes out in August. And lots of other good stuff too – I need to hole up in a cave for a week by myself and just read, read, read.

BEA Day 2 Report

The second day of BEA started with the Adult Book & Author Breakfast. Stephen Colbert hosted it and was hilarious of course. My favorite quote from him was that BEA was “the lollapalooza of reading quietly to yourself.” The authors who spoke at that breakfast were Junot Diaz, Barbara Kingsolver and Jo Nesbo. I enjoyed all of their talks, especially Jo Nesbo’s. He was really funny which I didn’t expect. Neither did Stephen Colbert – check out this video of Colbert being interviewed after hosting the breakfast: Colbert Interview

After the breakfast, I hit the show floor to scope out the exhibitor booths. Luckily BEA had a handy mobile app, BEA Mobile, that included a map of the convention floor and lists of all the exhibitors and author signings. The best thing about it was that I could add just the events I was interested in to the My Agenda function and just refer to it to know when I needed to be somewhere. I didn’t get to meet all of the authors I wanted to because some of them had ridiculously long lines. There are very few authors that I’ll wait in line for an hour or more to meet!

I was thrilled to meet Shannon Hale. She was autographing copies of her new book Princess Academy: Palace of Stone. It’s the sequel to the Newbery Honoree Princess Academy and will be released on August 21. I haven’t read Princess Academy – the main reason I wanted to meet Shannon was to gush to her about how much I loved The Actor and the Housewife. She said she loved that book too and that it was really hard to let go of Felix and Becky once the book was finished. I told her I felt the same way; I felt like they were my friends and I was sad to leave them when the book was over. I asked her if anyone had approached her about making a movie out of it and she said no. Someone needs to because that book would make an awesome movie! After our little chat, she signed my book, “To Rachel, who would be friends with Felix. Shannon Hale.” Now I love her even more.

One book I picked up that I’m excited about reading is The Diary of B.B. Bright Possible Princess by Alice Randall and Caroline Randall Williams. It caught my eye because of the black girl on the cover. Now that I have an African American daughter, I’m more tuned into how unfortunately rare it is for a person of color to be on a book cover and I’m always happy when I do see a cover that has a person of color on it.

The blurb on the back sounds intriguing: Thirteen-year-old orphan Black Bee Bright (B. B. for short) is funny, quirky, precocious, and adventurous. But B. B. has a secret. She’s captive on an island in “the middle of very tropical nowhere” because she’s forced to hide her true identity as a royally born princess from her parents’ enemies in Raven World. B. B and cool clothes, but she can’t escape the island until she passes her Official Princess Test and undertakes a dangerous journey alone to the East side of the island, where eight princesses must help her discover what it truly means to be a princess.

I chatted with the lady from Turner Publishing working in the booth about how much I like the cover and so forth and she gave me a copy of the book even though it wasn’t a title they had brought to give away. I thought that was really nice of her. It’s due for release in September 2012.

I picked up many other books – so many that I had to drop off a load at the Fed Ex kiosk before noon! And I thought I was being pretty selective about the galleys I chose. Hopefully I can get many of them read and reviewed soon – I hope they are all as good as they look!

I’m Back! BEA Day 1 Report

I’m back from BEA in New York and all rested up and ready to share my experience with you. I’m going to start with last Monday, which was the BEA Bloggers Conference.

The conference started with a Networking Breakfast. Lunch worked the same way but was called Let’s Talk Blogs! Networking Luncheon. It was really speed dating with authors. You picked a table to eat at with about eight other bloggers and every ten or fifteen minutes another author would rotate to your table. Each meal three or four authors would rotate through per table. Supposedly these authors were also bloggers and would use their time to talk about blogging with the bloggers at the table. This didn’t happen. The author would use most of the time to plug his or her new book and then answer any questions the bloggers at the table had about his or her new book. The only time we talked about blogs was when there wasn’t an author at our table. I really appreciated being able to meet fellow book bloggers and I learned a lot from talking to them. I could have actually done without the author networking though.

After breakfast, Jennifer Weiner gave the Keynote Address. I have mixed feelings about her talk. She made some good points about how women’s fiction isn’t taken seriously by the New York Times and other big book review outlets but some of it came off as her being bitter that her books aren’t taken more seriously. Moreover, her talk had almost nothing to do with blogging.

Next up was a panel discussion called Blogging Today: What you need to know and what’s next. I found this panel informative and helpful. Jen Lancaster was on the panel and I LOVE her. Another panelist was Candace from Beth Fish Reads, one of my favorite book review blogs. She had some good tips about diversifying your blog content to gain readers.

The breakout sessions were after lunch. The first one I went to was called So You Want to Make Money? According to the panel in this breakout, you can’t really make any money book blogging. Not enough to make a full-time job out of it anyway. (My dreams of being a millionaire book blogger were crushed!) They did have some interesting ideas about packaging blog content and charging for it. For example, making an e-book that compiles your reviews for your top twenty books of the year and then charging 99 cents for it. The panelists disagreed on whether or not people would actually be willing to pay for something like that.

The next breakout I attended was Demystifying the Book Blogger & Publisher Relationship. I enjoyed this panel and was quite surprised and pleased to see how much respect the panelists from the publishing industry have for book bloggers.

Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess, gave the Closing Remarks. She was hilarious, of course. I’m sure she was chosen to speak because she is a blogger who was able to basically turn her blog into a very successful book.

Overall, I was disappointed with most of the conference. It seemed like the organizers didn’t have a good understanding of who the attendees were or at least not the same understanding that I had of who they were. Every blogger I met at the conference was a book REVIEW blogger. Not a blogger like Jen Lancaster or Jenny Lawson who is wanting to turn their blog INTO a book.

I came expecting to learn more about how to write good book reviews, book blogging ethics and etiquette and things of that nature. The breakout sessions were great and had the sort of content I was expecting. The other events were mainly about promoting authors and their upcoming books. I shouldn’t have to pay for a conference if it’s going to be mostly advertising to me – they should be paying me! I’m glad I went for the experience and because I met a lot of really great book bloggers but I don’t know if I’ll go again. The focus would have to shift dramatically for me to consider it.

Guest Post from Steve Wiegenstein, author of Slant of Light

I’m so pleased to have a guest post from Steve Wiegenstein, the author of Slant of Light, today. I reviewed Slant of Light yesterday. Welcome to the Chaos Steve!

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I like writing about utopian communities, not because they are strange, but because they are familiar. I believe many of us carry the seed of the utopian in us.

Let’s start with the personal. A lot of people, myself included, have individual self-improvement projects on one burner or another, front, middle or back. (I almost said “everybody has an individual self-improvement project,” but then I remembered that there are those fortunate or deluded souls who think everything in just hunky-dory with themselves.) We’re going to drop a few pounds, we’re going to exercise more regularly, we’re going to write a thousand words every day . . .

And then there are those who take that self-improvement project a step further. We see them at the gym filling out their workout charts after every machine. They’re the ones posting photographs on Facebook of every low-fat, high-fiber vegetarian dish that they have so carefully crafted and eaten. The desire for self-improvement has become a quest for perfection, an obsession, a refusal to accept the entropic tendency that we are all heir to.

Take the next step—what’s good for me is also good for you—and then you’re starting down the road to something, whether it’s motivational leadership, preaching, setting up an ideal living arrangement, or simply being the crank who writes letters to the paper. The urge to improve is so basic that it’s easy to forget where self-improvement merges into general improvement, and where general improvement moves from “my humble opinion” to “this is a self-evident truth.”

So when I write about a utopian community, I’m not seeing people who are strange or different. I’m seeing people who have taken that same instinctive response we all experience when we come up with a great idea—You’ve got to try this! It’s great! It works!—and put it into genuine practice, in their own lives and in the lives of their fellow believers. We are all utopians, in some corner of our hearts.

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Thank you so much for stopping by Steve – great post!

Book Review: Slant of Light

Slant of Light by Steve Wiegenstein

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

Inspired by dreams of building a utopian society, James Turner, a charming writer and lecturer, Charlotte, his down-to-earth bride, and Cabot, and idealistic Harvard-educated abolitionist, are drawn together in a social experiment deep in the Missouri Ozarks. With Civil War looming, they are confronted with the hardships of building and sustaining a new community while staying neutral in an increasingly divided country. As love, longing, and betrayal, renegades, slave-catchers, and soldiers threaten to destroy their dreams, they discover that even the loftiest of ideas are at the mercy of politics and personal desire.

I chose this book because I live in Missouri and I thought it would be fun to read and learn about Missouri’s history during the time of the Civil War. Because James Turner’s utopian community, Daybreak, was somewhat isolated from the outside world the book wasn’t overloaded with historical facts. It had a good balance between the plot within Daybreak and the happenings of the outside world that inevitably creeps into life at Daybreak.

The characters are what really drives this novel. The three main characters – James, his wife Charlotte, and their friend Adam, start out as starry-eyed idealists, hoping that Daybreak will be the community of their dreams. When they start to see that reality and forces beyond their control will make building and maintaining Daybreak a struggle, we start to see their flaws. I liked that these characters were multi-dimensional and certainly not perfect. They made mistakes but I was able to sympathize with them and keep liking them.

I have to mention that since I Iive on the Missouri side of the Missouri/Kansas border, I thought this line from the beginning of the book was hilarious: “Politics was a game for reasonable men, and Kansas was no place to be reasonable.”

This book gave me a lot to think about and I was still mulling it over several days after reading it. Could a utopian community ever really work? Would we want it to? What would the purpose be? When James Turner tries to explain to someone that the purpose of Daybreak is to set an example for those around them, the man responds, “In other words, if I walk among murderers and thieves, my moral obligation is simply to avoid being a murderer and thief myself so that they may profit by my example.” Is that enough – what is the obligation of the members of an utopian community to the outside world? This book would be a great book club selection with these and so many other issues to discuss.

This book is published by Blank Slate Press, a small, independent publisher. Because of that I think it needs – and deserves! – some help in getting a buzz going about how good it is. I highly recommend Slant of Light. Get it, read it, talk about it. Spread the word!

Come back tomorrow to read a guest post from author Steve Wiegenstein.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for providing me with a copy of this book. Check out the other tour stops:

Monday, May 14th: Unabridged Chick
Wednesday, May 16th: WV Stitcher
Monday, May 21st: Life in Review
Wednesday, May 23rd: So Simply Sara
Thursday, May 24th: Bookish Habits
Monday, May 28th: Historical Tapestry – guest post
Tuesday, May 29th: A Novel Source
Thursday, May 31st: Life is Short. Read Fast.
Wednesday, June 6th: Just One More Paragraph
Saturday, June 9th: Colloquium

Buy this book at:
Amazon Kindle Store Powell’s Books

BEA or Bust

I’m heading to New York City today for the annual BookExpo America. It’s my first time attending BEA and I’m really excited. I won’t have time to blog about the show in real time but I will be sure to have detailed posts about my adventures when I get home. I WILL be live tweeting during my time there providing my crappy cell phone works in the convention center. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here: Follow @ChaosIsAFriend

If you are also going to BEA and want to meet up, please tweet or DM me. If you’ve been before and have any last minute tips for me, feel free to leave them in comments. I have a couple of reviews scheduled for this week so my blog won’t be totally silent. Ready or not, here I come!

Giveaway: Another Piece of My Heart

Tuesday I reviewed Another Piece of My Heart by Jane Green. I have an extra copy of the audiobook that I would like to giveaway to one of my lucky readers with a US mailing address. Just fill out the form below by 11:59pm CST on June 7th. Good luck!