About Time

Orson Scott Card's sci-fi classic Ender's Game  is being turned into a movie starring Asa Butterfield (Hugo)!  It is about time!  The movie will come out in March of 2013.  Click here for more info.

Anything that far out is still tentative.  Keep your fingers crossed that this movie actually gets made.  (Remember the Artemis Fowl movie, anyone?)

Books into Films

Yesterday, I shared that Andrew Henry's Meadow has been turned into a screenplay by none other than Zach Braff.  Today, I learned that The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater - and it JUST came out - has already been optioned by Warner Brothers.  Oh my! 

I grew up reading all of Walter Farley's wonderful horse books. - Well, I thought they were wonderful.  I have revisited The Black Stallion since then and it is still wonderful.  Some of the later titles turned into formula books - scrappy jockey and/or trainer takes underrated loser horse and turns her or him into a WINNER!!!  YAY!!

Reading The Scorpio Races brought all that excitement back.  HOWEVER, the Scorpio Races don't end in just a win or losses.  They always end in death for one or more jockeys.  And their mounts are the predators!  So take Farley and add Bram Stoker and throw in a signature Stiefvater strong female character, some struggling siblings and a lad enslaved to his magical mount and its owner and you have...breathlessness. Intense page-turning breathlessness. 

I hope they do justice to this book.  This is a film I want to see.

BTW, The Lorax is being turned into a new animated feature - very colorful and 3-D-ish - due out in March, 2012. What would Hollywood do without books?

Games, stories, movies and summer heat

Whoa!  I have a summer cold, the kind that comes on with extreme changes in temperature and fans blowing all over the place.  We don't have central air-conditioning and we keep our window ac off for most of the day.

On Friday, I spent the day closing off the family room doorways - no doors - with curtains to keep the cool air in.  The curtains are thin but the difference between one side of the curtains and the other is dramatic.

But you know all about the weather. Just look out your window.

I have one more week of Stories in the Schools and then the amazing Teen Tellers and I and several wonderful adult volunteers will put on a Storytelling Workshop.  That is always fun. Last week, Stories in the Schools were so much fun.  The theme was friendship and we talked about games.  I found a wonderful website of games for camp counselors - The Ultimate Camp Resource.  And on the site was a game called Beat the Bunny.  It was so simple, I worried that the older children might not like it but the kids cheered and hollered.

Here is how the game is played.  Sit in a circle and start passing around a small ball - I used a small balloon.  When the smaller ball is half way around the circle, start passing a larger ball or balloon in the same direction.  The small ball is the bunny and the larger ball is the farmer.  The farmer can change direction anytime the players want it to.  But the bunny must go in the same direction UNTIL the farmer changes direction.  That causes all the excitement.  It takes some players longer to notice that the bunny is heading right into the farmer's hands.  The game is over when the two balls end up in the same lap.  We played the game with three different groups of children between the ages of 3 and 7 and the reaction was the same with each group.  Laughter and cheers!  One teen helper lamented, "We never played fun games like that!"  Thanks, Ultimate Campers.

The schools are all air-conditioned which makes these programs even more enticing.

Movie theaters are also good places to beat the heat.  We went to see HP 7, part 2 TWICE this week.  I felt like watching it again, actually, and I am not a movie go-er.  As the professors prepared Hogwarts for battle, I found myself crying.  They all seemed to feel so hopeless.  And even though we all know how the movie will end - or do if we read the books - that feeling that the professors and the students are doomed really comes across.  Voldemort sounded so reasonable when he offered them safety in return for Harry.  Scary and wonderful.

Talking about movies - and I am talking about movies - the Hobbit movies are taking so long to make that Peter Jackson is posting videos about the process on his Facebook page. ( I hope this link works.)  I long to visit Middle Earth - my generation's Hogwarts.

Chanda's Secrets - Need a Good Cry?

A good cry is like a summer thunderstorm, clearing out the stickiness of emotions and replacing them with a cool breeze.  Tears that fall because everyday life can scar us with questions and confusion and uncertainties - these tears cleanse and let us recalibrate, reorient, and get back on track.

On a night when no one has emailed me and no one is home to chat, on an evening when my husband must go to bed early to prepare for his early morning job, when suddenly the home I rejoiced in several hours before seems echoing and empty, at times like these doubts and fears come creeping, creeping.

Times like these call for a good cry.  And if YOU need a good cry, read Chanda's Secrets by Allan Stratton.  Young teen Chanda has the horrible task of hiring an undertaker for her baby sister's funeral.  Her sister's father is off drunk somewhere and her mother must stay home with the younger children, Iris who is five and Solly who is four.  In a South African community where people die of "TB" or "cancer" and where the disease AIDS is not even discussed - where making plans for death is just bringing on bad luck, Chanda and her mother are barely keeping things together.  When Papa and the older boys died in a mine explosion, the family spiraled downward.  They were lucky that a married man hired them, but unlucky when he turned his wandering eyes on Chanda - lucky, when a neighbor couple took them in, luckier still when an old, kindly widower married Mama and left her the house.  Now Sara has died and Mama can't get out of bed and Jonah, the stepfather has left and whispers, whispers, whispers make the whole family outcasts.

Secrets, superstition, unkindness that comes from fear, and a disease that cannot be stopped because no one will admit that it exists add up to the perfect catalyst for a good cry.  The ending is victorious.  Chanda faces her mother's illness and refuses to hide it.  Her busybody neighbor steps up to be a support and a comfort.  And there is hope, hope for change and hope for Chanda.

And you won't just get a good cleansing cry out of this book.  You will get perspective because Chanda's Secrets (watch the book trailer) may be fiction but it is based very firmly in the facts of HIV/AIDS and how ignorance, superstition and fear keep people from dealing with the disease.  And an empty inbox just can't compete with that for sadness.

The book has become a movie, Life, Above All,  and was highly acclaimed at the Cannes Film Festival last year.