BOOKS & MOVIES | 2015 Edition

Before I get this started I realized that I didn’t announce the winner of the giveaway for the Winter Re-Read-a-Thon book!  The winner was Cait Toliver and she chose to get Ask the Passengers by A.S. King!  So thank you to everyone who entered and participated throughout the read-a-thon!

Next I have heard from a couple people that they would be interested in doing some of the 2015 challenges with me so I was considering making a Goodreads group for the PopSugar challenge.  If you are interested in that sound off below and I will set that up and send out a link for everyone!

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Now onto the fun stuff!  Books have been a starting point for a ton of movies over the years.  Movies like Mary Poppins, literally any Disney movie (thank you Grimm’s Fairytales) and a host of others have all brought characters that we have fallen in love with to life on the big screen.  In some fashion it is a right of passage for books to make the transition from novel to movie.  Sometimes the movie does a phenomenal job of bringing light to a story that many people love, but sometimes it strays just a bit to far and makes people wonder just how much input the author had in the movie making process.

In 2015 there are a handfull of movies coming out that are based on books and I must say that I am incredibly excited for all of them to make their debut.  So I decided to put together a list of the book to movie adaptations that I am most excited for this year!

5. Paper Towns by John Green 

This book was the second John Green book that I had the pleasure of reading.  While I didn’t like it as much as The Fault in Our Stars, it was still a great read and one that I would highly recommend.  The story follows to main character, a boy named Q and a girl named Margo.  Margo has always been adventurous and daring and when she disappears, Q makes it his mission to find his childhood friend.  John Green has had a major role in the making of this movie (he’s producing it), so I have tons of faith that this movie will stick very close to the book like The Fault in Our Stars did.

4. The Choice by Nicolas Sparks

Let’s be honest here for a second.  If anyone is a hopeless romantic its me.  I read all the cheesy romance novels, love the hopelessly unrealistic love stories and swoon over the handsome man who sweeps the girl off her feet.  The whole idea of a slightly troubled relationship or the bachelor who just can’t grow up until he meets the perfect woman, OR the story of two lovebirds growing old together just tugs at my heart strings.  And let’s be honest now, Nicolas Sparks knows what he’s doing when he writes for us hopeless romantics in the world.  The Choice follows the story of a bachelor who ends up falling for the girl next door.  And then comes all of the wonderful Nicolas Sparks magic.  Nicolas Sparks books have always translated very well into movies so I am incredibly excited to see one of my favorites make the transition!

3. Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Gone Girl came out earlier this year and wowed everyone who went to see it, to my knowledge at least.  So when it was announced that Dark Places would be coming out this year I was super excited.  While I have not read this book yet, I did read Gone Girl and it was amazing.  If you haven’t read it yet I would HIGHLY recommend that you pick it up. Dark Places focuses on another chilling story, featuring the main character Libby, whose mother and sister were murdered in their farm house.  Libby’s testimony ends up sending her brother to jail for the crime, but then she joins Kill Club and starts to rethink was actually happened.  This story sounds amazing, haunting and chilling so I can’t wait to see what the all-star cast of this movie does with the story.

2. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Speaking of creepy stories, this book by Ransom Riggs features not only a chilling story but also some brilliantly creepy photography inside it’s pages.  Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a young adult book focusing on a boy named Jacob who grew up listening to his grandfather’s stories of levitating girls and invisible boys.  After his grandfather dies, Jacob finds a strange letter that sends him to Welsh island where he finds the children that his grandfather told him about. It’s creepy and supernatural and I’m super pumped to see how they choose to translate this to film and if they do the sequel as well.

1. Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

MOCKINGJAY IS COMING! I couldn’t possibly be anymore excited to see the final chapter in the Hunger Games movie saga.  The Hunger Games trilogy is a dystopian novel that while many people realize is definitely disturbing but in a way that captures everyone’s attention and draws them in, also holds some terrifying parallels to our society today. We are the capitol and the districts all at once and that in itself is terrifying and heartbreak.  It’s also extremely interesting.  For me these books represent what Young Adult literature should be, especially in the dystopian genre.  Books are meant to make us think, make us notice things in our society we wouldn’t have before.  I have been incredibly pleased with this movie franchise so far and I can’t wait to see how they wrap things up.  You better believe I am going to marathoning this trilogy before I go to see the final movie.

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These are the top 5 book to movie adaptations I’m excited for this year.  Let me know down in the comments below which ones you are excited for and your thoughts on the ones I chose!

BOOK REVIEW | After

Rating: 3/5 stars

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Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Goodreads

Connect with the Author!

Twitter | Official Website

Summary from Barnes and Noble:

There was the time before Tessa met Hardin, and then there’s everything AFTER… Life will never be the same. #Hessa.

Tessa is a good girl with a sweet, reliable boyfriend back home. She’s got direction, ambition, and a mother who’s intent on keeping her that way.

But she’s barely moved into her freshman dorm when she runs into Hardin. With his tousled brown hair, cocky British accent, tattoos, and lip ring, Hardin is cute and different from what she’s used to.

But he’s also rude—to the point of cruelty, even. For all his attitude, Tessa should hate Hardin. And she does—until she finds herself alone with him in his room. Something about his dark mood grabs her, and when they kiss it ignites within her a passion she’s never known before.

He’ll call her beautiful, then insist he isn’t the one for her and disappear again and again. Despite the reckless way he treats her, Tessa is compelled to dig deeper and find the real Hardin beneath all his lies. He pushes her away again and again, yet every time she pushes back, he only pulls her in deeper.

Tessa already has the perfect boyfriend. So why is she trying so hard to overcome her own hurt pride and Hardin’s prejudice about nice girls like her?

Unless…could this be love?

Review:

I recieved this book from Gallery Books in exchange for a review of the book.

**This book contains mature content**

I LOVE fanfiction.  I applaud those who write it and bend and shape pre-existing stories to create new adventures with old characters.  For those of you who have not explored the world of fanfiction I highly encourage it.  Although I would express a word of warning when searching topics for fanfiction and searching websites for fanfiction.  Normally they are well labeled for how appropriate they are for certain ages, but just so everyone is aware I make no guarantees of what you will find.

I went into reading After blind.  I did very minimal research on the book before I requested it, but I did this for a reason.  I have found that many people are unhappy about fanfiction being published like original works are.  I understand their reasoning for this but I didn’t want their unhappiness about it or bias opinions to taint a book that I otherwise might enjoy.  And I did enjoy parts of this books.  However there were some problems I found with it that forced me to give the book 3 stars instead of a higher rating.

What I Enjoyed:

I thought that the pace of this book was excellent especially considering how long this book is.  While most new adult/romance novels run at about 200 pages, this book comes in at a whopping 600 pages.  It is nothing to sneeze at.  When I first picked up the book the fact that it was so large was definitely daunting.  I wasn’t sure how the author was going to stretch the story in order to get it to the length that she had.  While the book does drag at some points and there were some things that I could see being taken out to shorten the book, I felt that it kept a decent pace throughout and allowed the reader to continue at a steady pace throughout.  The other thing that I rather enjoyed about this book is that, while it was a bit cliche in how it was written, for the most part the mature content in the book was well written.  Also please note that I am basing this book off of fanfiction for the most part.  I thought that as far as fanfiction writing goes, this book was well written and kept to the format for new adult and romance novels with their “love” scenes.

What I Wasn’t As Fond of:

Some of the portions of this book seemed a bit repetitive.  Events that happened earlier in the book felt like they repeated or occurred in a similar matter later in the book which was something that got on my nerves a bit.  However that was a minor thing compared to the scheme of things that could have been wrong.  The other portion of this book that bothered me a little were the hints of emotional abuse that I could see in the Harry Styles character.  For me this was a bit of a turn off but let’s be honest if we look at literature that is circulating today emotional abuse in main characters isn’t terribly uncommon *cough* Twilight *cough*.  For some people I know this was outraging and something they could have done without in the book.  For me I saw less of it than they picked up on but could still sense undertones of it.

This book is definitely still worth a read if you are intrigued by it.  As far as fanfiction goes I was pretty alright with how this book turned out, even if I might not pick up the rest of the books in this series.

{{Doctor Who Book Tag}}

This wonderful tag combines two of my favorite things, Doctor Who and books!  Now I didn’t let my inner Whovian fangirl too hard but this tag was a blast to film!  It was created by Sam from Novels and Nonsense and Sabrina Handal from Books and Adventures.  There is a link to the original video as well as their channels in the description box of the video so be sure to check that out.  As always I am tagging all of you in this video and I am very excited to see which of you readers are Whovians yourself (don’t be shy we all know Doctor Who is amazing 😉 ).