Top Five

Book Review-Final Exam

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen takes the mysterious world of the 1930’s American circus and brings it to life. The characters and scenes Gruen writes are as real as words on paper can be. She makes simple words, inked onto simple paper leap from the page and wrap the audience up, sucking them into a historical vortex; taking them from their average lives to something much more.

                Starting with a bang Jacob Jankowski’s perfectly mapped out life is twisted in a knot when his parents are killed in a car accident. Desperate to escape the fragrant, powdery church women, bankruptcy and inevitable homelessness, Jacob hops a train. And not just any train, but the train of the Benzini Brothers Greatest Show on Earth…a traveling circus. With arms tucked tightly against their chests, the crew is far from welcoming. A few of the older crew men make an effort to accommodate Jacob, while some don’t, and thus Gruen begins her daunting task of creating a cloud of sympathy over even some of the meanest of characters.

                Seemingly entirely cruel and sniveling, August Rosenbluth is written to be a menace. A crew chomping wife beater, in charge of the same animals he brutally beats into submission. As cruel as the afore mentioned man is, Gruen somehow manages to place him a sympathetic bubble. She has the audience despising his guts one minute and cooing at his feet the next. “How could Marlena just walk away from him? He bought her such a pretty necklace. I think he must love her.”  They claim. How confused were we as the audience. What to do with our emotions when such an immense character conflict arises. Who do we side with? When the movie came out, the choice of actors made that decision a touch easier.

                In the book, Jacob is portrayed as early twenties, a kind and sweet hearted ginger. When the movie made its first appearance on the big screen, Jacob came along a little older, a little more challenging, and a whole lot more attractive. Gruen does an excellent job contrasting Jacob and August, the two main characters. Jacob is given the job of cleaning up the mess his counter makes of the circus’ animals. One hurts them, one heals them. The foil is uncanny. A confusing element, often brought up throughout the book, is who loves Marlena more. While August is her husband, providing for her in the most expensive ways, it seems to lean more in Jacob’s direction. He may be a dirt poor scoundrel but he, well Gruen, certainly has the right frame of mind:

"We lean against the wall in silence, still holding hands. After about an hour she falls asleep, sliding down until her head rests on my shoulder. I remain awake, every fiber of my body aware of her proximity."

While characters are great, you can’t have a book made entirely of characters, especially not entirely of human characters. The setting is one of the more important elements of a great novel. Does it feel real, somewhere you can climb into and out of while you read? Is it a dynamic place, a colorful world, somewhere you actually want to spend time in? For Sara Gruen’s novel, Water for Elephants, all of that is a big fat yes.  The setting she creates is unlike a lukewarm soft drink where you’ll drink it because it’s there and it’s not awful and you’re thirsty, but it’s not really a great quencher. Water for elephants is like a cold Gatorade on a hot summer day after you’ve been mowing the lawn under the sun. Her playful animal characters tie all the loose ends. They are magnetic, holding the book together. The connect Jacob and Marlena, August and the show, Jacob and the show, and hold the show itself together. These fuzzy characters provide the book with enough symbolism to fill a high-school English class, and enough unconditional love to fill your Grandma’s living room.  

My Links

http://saragruen.com/
Water for Elephant's author website
http://www.suzannecollinsbooks.com/
Hunger Games author website
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1659337/
Movie info/pictures for Perks of Being a Wallflower
http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/Hunger+Games+Harry+Potter+multiple+trophies+Movie+Awards/6725420/story.html
Books to Movies awards
http://www.bigstonegap.org/ourtown/trigiani.htm
Big Stone Gap author website

Where is the Line?

I think that the story should be mostly true in order to be called a memoir. I don’t think that it has to be totally true to be a good book though. While it may not be a memoir, a made up story can still be good. A Million Little Pieces may have been mostly a lie or a little bit a lie or however much a lie, but in the end it’s a good book and that’s why readers kept reading it. It’s a hard industry and James Frey did what he had to do to get his book out there.  I don’t think the genre labels are as important as everyone makes them.

It is okay if a book is partially in one category and partially in another. We have all seen iTunes attempt to classify music as rock, alternative, etc. and a lot of the time I’m thinking…ehh that’s not really what I was thinking.  What books are classified as are just names, a good book is a good book.

If we have to give genres labels I would agree that memoirs should be true. Obviously no one wants to read a conversation like:

Mark leaned over and said, “hey”,  then I said, “hey”, then he said, “how’s your wife”, and I said, “Oh she’s good, and Karen?”, on and on. That would be a terrible book. No one’s life is interesting enough to be completely and accurately documented and sold for millions of dollars around the world.

Readicide

I don’t think that schools should stop teaching the classics. It isn’t WHAT we read; it’s what we have to do while reading it. Analyzing every aspect of the book and finding themes and elements that aren’t even there is what kills reading. I could lie in bed and read Jane Eyre for a few hours. It wasn’t my favorite but it was a totally tolerable book. However, since I didn’t want to make notes and highlight the living crap out of it, I avoided reading it all together. Then it became a pattern to just avoid reading the books so I wouldn’t have to active read. When my second tri teacher started checking our active reading I developed a new system. I would not read the book, but put a clean post it on every other page, highlight any random sentence and then go back through and write the “meaning” of that sentence on the post it. It proved to be an effective system, however I wasn’t actually reading.

I like to read the classics in school though. Otherwise I would never read them and there are a lot of them that I really like. I loved To Kill a Mockingbird and I liked Color of Water and Romeo and Juliet. They were all good stories but I didn’t even finish the first two because they give us so much to do and analyze in so little an amount of time. I always wanted to go back and finish them but we would have already moved on to the next book so I never got around to it.

There definitely is a difference between literary and commercial. Literary is more fancy and creative whereas commercial just tells a story. I think that literary book authors should get credit for being talented writers but if the commercial book sells, those writers deserve the money. I think commercial writers get a really bad rap.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read - Mark Twain

Trailer

The Help

BOOK 2, The Help Some challenges the filmakers would have include casting, making the movie authentic to the time period, and filming a movie with such controversial issues. In order to make the right casting, you would have to choose people that can do a great southern accent, specific to Mississippi. I think it would probably be best to find actors and actresses from Missippi to get the most authentic accent. It's also hard to adapt a movie from a different time period because you have to get the details right. I think the most important part is that they have a good wardrobe and make the houses appropriate to the time because that is what people will focus on the most. It would be essential to keep the scenes that focus on how Mrs. Leefolt is a bad mother. It really characterizes her and the other women of that time that hired help. The scene where she smacks Mae Mobley would be the most important. Another important scene would be when Ms. Skeeter asks if Aibileen would change things. That sets the stage for what will happen between them throughout the book. The last important scene is where they discuss the issue of the bathroom for the help. That also sets the stage and sort of fuels the fire for Ms. Skeeter and Aibileen to change things. I would cut some of the parts that are purely descriptionary and don't add to the plot. The scene where it discusses the garden that Aibileen gets from her neighbor and the scene or scenes where Aibileen spends time with Mae Mobely that where nothing really happens. It's important to make sure a relationship is built between the two, but film time shouldn't be wasted on uneventful things.