Week in Review: August 31

Posted on by missprint

 

missprintweekreview

This week on the blog you can check out:

You can also enter my epic blog birthday giveaway all month!

This week has been bananas! I’m part of a service at my place of employ called BookMatch which is a way people can submit electronic forms to get personalized book recommendations. It’s awesome and I love it but we had a HUGE epic response to the launch so there are a ton of questions and I am turning into a reader’s advisory machine.

If you want to join the fun you can find out about BookMatch here: http://www.bklynlibrary.org/bookmatch

If you submit a request looking for YA and or YA SFF titles there is a high probability you will get a list from me!

I am also still reeling from the news that Hello Kitty is not a cat. In this crazy, mixed up world I always thought I could rely on a few simple truths. One of those truths was that Hello Kitty was a cat. I don’t know what to believe anymore. Is everything a lie?

Last weekend I saw If I Stay at the movies with Nicole. I didn’t like it. So I’m not going to post a review but I am going to share some thoughts here if you are wondering. (I also strongly urge everyone to still go and see it because although I didn’t like it, the movie still has its appeal and you have to support the type of things you want to see in theaters–like YA book adaptations). Also I’m still wildly excited by the idea of the sequel.

I should have known, even before I saw it, that I wasn’t going to be thrilled with If I Stay because I was never sold on the casting. While both did well in the film, the actors playing Mia and Adam never felt like Mia and Adam to me. I am also sad to say I wasn’t impressed with Moretz’s performance.

I last read this book before living through 2013 and I had not counted on how strong my reactions would be still to the accident and hospital scenes. Call it post-traumatic stress or personal distaste but I could barely watch the movie when it was in the hospital–it was that painful. Part of this is my own fault and a reaction to the source material. Such is life.

A more minor annoyance was that the name of Adam’s band was changed. Which is fine except that it was distracting. Speaking of distracting, the director spent so much time on Adam’s band performing that we saw almost nothing of Mia’s friendship with Kim. That decision in particular is infuriating and became the main reason I did not enjoy the movie. Yes, If I Stay is a super dramatic romance. But it’s also a story about the enduring bonds of friendship and family. We got the family part. Would it have been so hard to cut out one song and give Mia and Kim a scene together where they are not talking about Adam?

So those are my thoughts on If I Stay and why I wasn’t happy with the film adaptation.

In other news my twitter friend Eden is hosting a read along of Winger in September. Details on her blog: http://edynjean.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/winger-read-a-thon/