Title: Divergent
Author: Veronica Roth
Narrators: Emma Galvin
Rating (Story): ★★☆☆☆
Rating (Narration):★★★★★
In the world of Divergent, society is divided into five factions, each of which prize a particular virtue (intelligence, bravery, etc.). At age 16, children must choose which faction to belong to and changing factions means leaving all friends and family behind. Tris’s choice to leave the selfless faction for Dauntless is brutally hard and she has a secret to hide which will make things even harder. Continue reading
Today I have a couple of exciting updates for this year’s Book to Movie Challenge. This year for the challenge, Sergio of Tipping My Fedora reviewed over 20 books and their movie adaptations while I’ve been working pretty hard to meet my goal of 12. So I thought, you know who should be co-hosting this challenge? Sergio. So I asked if he’d be interested and he said yes! That means that for two of the quarterly round-ups, Sergio will be doing posts updating you on how the challenge is going while I do the other two. Once the linky for adding reviews goes live next year, you’ll also be able to add reviews at a post on his blog as well as here at Doing Dewey.
As many of you could probably tell just from the trailers, the movie version of World War Z is nothing like the book. Instead of a series of interviews detailing the scientific, political, and social details of a zombie plague, this is an action-packed continuous narrative starring stay-at-home dad Brad Pitt. I was very pleased that the ethnic diversity of the original story made it into the movie. I was equally disappointed by the fact that we no longer got much of the big picture of how the world slowly reacted to the plague. Instead, Brad Pitt and his family are caught almost completely unawares by an attack of fast moving zombies that convert victims into zombies in seconds to minutes. In addition to turning almost immediately, zombies are also identifiable by their creepy white eyes. I think this eliminated a rather interesting complication from the book. Most of the changes, however, seemed like the right choice to me. Following one character throughout made me much more invested in the story and the solution to the zombie plague, while implausible, was also more clever than the brute force approach adopted in the book. Overall, this is not the book and I’m almost not sure they should have kept the name, but it was a great movie that was at least as good as the book, possibly better.
Title: World War Z
Title: Orange Is the New Black
Title: Sense and Sensibility
