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Chaos Walking will be\u00a0in theaters in 2020. Now’s your chance to read this extraordinary novel by Patrick Ness first!<\/p><\/div> Are we losing or gaining readers once the silver screen projects kids’ books?<\/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-30697","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\/30697","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=30697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30697\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nCharlie and the Chocolate Factory<\/em>. The Wizard of Oz<\/em>.\u00a0Mary Poppins<\/em>. Movies made from children’s books can mean blockbuster sales for Hollywood, and can be joyful, enduring touchstone\u00a0experiences for families. Often, children may not even know that the movie they’re seeing is based on a book, or that\u2014as in the case of Mary Poppins<\/em>\u2014the book\u00a0may be markedly different in tone or content from the film.\u00a0These days, producers hungry for good stories eagerly snap up\u00a0film rights\u00a0sometimes even before a book has been published, and\u00a0the movie may\u00a0hit the public scene shortly after the book’s publication. Is this a good thing? Do movies\u00a0broaden the reach of\u00a0a book, or are we losing readers to the silver screen? I think\u00a0a little of both.
\nSometimes, the existence of a movie kills a book, especially if it’s not as good as the book (and they\u00a0so often aren’t). I remember my surprise as a young bookseller\u00a0discovering\u00a0how resistant\u00a0kids were to reading Harriet the Spy<\/em>, one of my all-time favorite middle grade novels and a formative childhood book for so many adult women I know. (We all went through a phase of adopting slouchy sweatshirts and carrying tiny notebooks with stubby pencils everywhere we went.) It turned out that these kids had seen the movie, and while they thought it was okay, it didn’t leave them wanting more. This experience\u2014of recommending a great book only to be met with a disinterested “I already saw the movie”\u2014has happened again and again over the years, to books as wonderful as A Wrinkle in Time<\/em>, The Book of Three\/<\/em>The Black Cauldron<\/em>, and Anne of Green Gables<\/em>. It kills my book-loving heart when a movie\u2014especially a mediocre or bad one\u2014loses readers for the best books.
\n![](\"https:\/\/i.gr-assets.com\/images\/S\/compressed.photo.goodreads.com\/books\/1217462137l\/3932530.jpg\")
\u00a0![](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/0\/0e\/Harriet_the_Spy_%281996_film%29_poster.jpg\/220px-Harriet_the_Spy_%281996_film%29_poster.jpg\")
\n(I haven’t seen the Harriet the Spy<\/em>\u00a0movie, and I’m sure it’s fine, but I mourn for the lost readers!)
\nKids don’t have any reason to know or question what they’re missing, of course. There were many movies I saw as a child and had no idea they were based on books. I adored Chitty Chitty Bang Bang\u00a0(<\/em>even though the child catcher Freaked Me Out), and it never occurred to me to wonder if the movie\u00a0came from a book. I doubt that, even as avid a reader as I was, I would have cared if I had known. My sister and I loved the movie Paper Moon<\/em> as teenagers;\u00a0I’d never\u00a0heard of the novel Addie Pray<\/em> by Joe David Brown or wanted to pick it up once I learned about it. Heck, it’s happened as an adult, too. Breakfast at Tiffany’s<\/em> was my parents’ favorite movie, and “Moon River” was their song, so I was introduced to it young and didn’t know until my 20’s or 30’s that it was based on a Truman Capote novel\u2014which I admit I still haven’t read. The Princess Bride<\/em> was a\u00a0delightful movie, and it took me years after learning that it was a William Goldman book to finally read it. So I think that sometimes whichever format catches\u00a0the heart first wins out.
\nSome books, however,\u00a0seem impervious to the silver screen’s effects, and it may have to do with having earned and solidified such enormous amounts of widespread love and acclaim as books that kids are curious about and drawn to them in written form despite loving the movie version. Seeing The Wizard of Oz<\/em> every single year on TV didn’t\u00a0keep me from reading the entire L. Frank Baum series. Watching the Harry Potter<\/em> movies doesn’t seem to keep most kids from reading the series\u2014possibly because they can read the books long before parents\u00a0will let them see the films. And there are many Game of Thrones<\/em> fans who have come from the HBO series to the books. Ditto The Handmaid’s Tale<\/em>. And The Hate U Give\u00a0<\/em>seems to be a\u00a0story that kids\u00a0seek out in book form regardless of whether or not they’ve seen the movie.
\n![](\"https:\/\/images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/91dSMhdIzTL.jpg\")
\u00a0 ![](\"https:\/\/covers3.booksamillion.com\/covers\/bam\/0\/38\/549\/081\/038549081X_b.jpg\")
\u00a0![](\"https:\/\/d1o5nklc3mwtqp.cloudfront.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/22101720\/HateUGive_StickersPlacement.jpg\")
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\nI do find myself wishing <\/span>parents<\/span> would do<\/span>\u00a0family read-alouds of the wonderful children’s books, or press those books into their kids’ hands (like Little Women<\/em>!) before they <\/span>show their kids the movie versions<\/span>, so those reading experiences\u2014so rich and so different in kind from the <\/span>film<\/span>s\u2014won’t be lost.\u00a0<\/span>
\nAnd to that end, here\u00a0are a couple of articles listing\u00a0books\u2014for kids and adults\u2014that are being made into movies this year and next: from\u00a0BookTrust,<\/a>\u00a0PopSugar<\/a>, Cosmopolitan<\/a>.
\nHappy reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"