{"id":18068,"date":"2016-03-01T07:00:10","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18068"},"modified":"2016-03-01T07:00:10","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T12:00:10","slug":"books-that-would-make-great-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18068","title":{"rendered":"Books That Would Make Great Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movie versions of kids’ books are iffy. A few\u00a0are great; many are mediocre or worse. I always encourage children to read the book before seeing the movie, because the book is almost always better. That said,\u00a0there are some books based on real events that could be fantastic movies. For instance:
\n
\n\"\"<\/a>My colleague Sandy suggested this idea for a blog post. Recently, she pressed a copy of Phoebe the Spy<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>by Judith Berry Griffin (illus. by Margot Tomes)\u00a0into the hands of a friend who directs\u00a0action films. She told him\u00a0she knew this wasn’t his genre, but thought he\u00a0might know the right person for it. It’s the\u00a0terrific, suspenseful true story\u00a0of an African-American girl who \u2014 in the guise of George Washington’s housekeeper \u2014 became a spy for American revolutionaries in the 1700’s and successfully helped avert\u00a0a plot to assassinate Washington. What a\u00a0fantastic, positive, inspiring, and action-filled story to bring to a wide audience! And how revolutionary to show\u00a0an African-American character\u00a0in history who \u2014 though in danger because of the spying \u2014 leads\u00a0a life that isn’t primarily\u00a0downtrodden. Audiences\u00a0would be intrigued and inspired by such a kicka** young heroine!
\n\"\"<\/a>Sandy also thought that Margi Preus’s wonderful Shadow on the Mountain<\/a><\/strong><\/em> would make a wonderful movie, and I agree!\u00a0Another true espionage story, this one is about a 14-year-old Norwegian boy during World War II who smuggled illegal newspapers through his Nazi-occupied territory and carried supplies to members of the resistance\u00a0in the mountains. The book culminates with his escape over the mountains. As the Horn Book<\/em> wrote in its glowing review, “The final chapters, which chronicle Espen’s dramatic escape to Sweden \u2014 days and nights of mountain skiing, Nazis in hot pursuit \u2014 take the book into adventure-thriller territory without losing the humanity that characterizes Preus’s account.” Who wouldn’t want to see that movie?!
\n\"\"<\/a>The mountainous adventure made me think of another book whose movie I would eagerly watch: Jordan Romero’s No Summit Out of Sight: The True Story of the Youngest Person to Climb the Seven Summits<\/a>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>As young as age 10, Romero knew he wanted to climb big mountains and dreamed of climbing the world’s highest peaks \u2014 a challenge for climbers twice his age and much more experienced. At 13, he summitted Everest. The book is filled not only with Romero’s successes, but also the struggles and tough\u00a0moments where he almost gave up. It’s a gripping read, all the better for being true. It’s likely this book (and possibly either of the other two I mentioned) has already been optioned, but if that’s true, let’s get cracking and make those movies, studios!
\nIt occurred to me that all of the books I imagined wanting to be made into movies were nonfiction titles. I often don’t like my fictional heroes and heroines remade by someone else, but retelling a true story on the silver screen feels different.
\n\"\"Of course, the minute I say that, I think about Cynthia Kadohata’s The Thing About Luck<\/em><\/strong>, which I\u00a0think would make an incredibly appealing movie. Winner of the National Book Award (and recipient of six starred reviews), this book tells the story of a 12-year-old girl named Summer whose family’s luck has taken a turn for the worse.
\nLeft in the care of\u00a0their\u00a0grandparents, Summer and her brother, Jaz, have to help navigate harvest season for the big company that hires them as farm workers.\u00a0This story is so refreshing, funny, and packed with heart. It’s a different perspective from ones we typically see in films\u00a0\u2014 Summer as a contemporary Japanese-American kid growing up with very traditional Japanese grandparents \u2014\u00a0and is full of events both large and small\u00a0(like To Kill a Mockingbird\u00a0<\/em>or Bridge to Terabithia \u2014<\/em> hint, hint, movie people). It’s also a timely story, set in current times when so many American children\u00a0work as\u00a0migrant laborers on farms, and many\u00a0of us (especially urbanites) know so little about that world.
\nPeople are hungry for stories that inspire their souls and enrich their minds, especially when accomplished without saccharine sweetness or heavy-handed moralizing. As Maggie Smith’s character in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage<\/em> says, beating her drum, “Enlarge! Enliven! Enlighten!”
\nThis year’s\u00a0Oscars for a bunch of movies glorifying violent\u00a0solutions to manmade\u00a0ills made me yearn for stories of real people acting courageously and generously during difficult times \u2014 and making a significant positive difference as a result.
\nWhat children’s and young adult books would YOU most like to see on the silver screen (as long as they aren’t mangled in the process)?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Four books that could electrify the silver screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}