Young Adult Readings

I noticed earlier that The Face on the Milk Carton was on SoapNet and I couldn't resist watching some of it. I loved that book when I was a kid. I read the first three, and just found out there is a fourth. But I remember liking the first two a lot and thinking the third was so-so. I also distinctly recall being mad about the TV movie because they changed things (other than the fact that the movie combines the first two novels). Like they changed the Springs to the Sands and the Johnsons to the Jessmons for no real reason. How is that a big deal in the movie world? It does make some sense that they took out the twins who were her real little brothers, but I didn't see that when I was a child. And I was mad because her boyfriend Reeve was so much cuter in my head than the dude they cast (he was also Kyle on My So-Called Life). I also recall thinking it was weird that the only people with Southern accents were Sharon Stone and her new sister and even cringing some at the sister's bad acting
(cringing hold up on rewatching). Oops.

My very favorite books when I was a kid were the Anne of Green Gables series. I loved those books so much. I remember that my grandparents gave the set to my cousin for her birthday and I read the back of all of them and really wanted to read them. So when my ninth birthday came a few months later, I also got a set of the books! I was so thrilled. And I read all eight books at least eight times. I learned new words. I was such a nerd. I never looked them up in the dictionary or anything, it was all context clues, so sometimes when I would use these new words I would be a little off. Which, whatever, I was a kid. I do remember that I went through a phase in fourth grade where I said things were queer (I learned it from a book) and I couldn't figure out why my mom would yell at me for saying it. Anyway, I also remember being irritated by the movies based on the first couple of those books. They just didn't fit my mental images.

I still kind of get that way about movies based on books that I've read. Recently I saw Into the Wild and thought, while it did have beautiful scenery, it just wasn't the same as the book. It dragged more than the book, and you can tell that Sean Penn was a little too in love with his subject, where Krakauer obviously saw the folly in McCandless' actions, as well as his reasoning behind them. Penn also saw fit to add an abuse plot for his parents. Which, no, dude. He was a middle-class white kid whose parents made some mistakes(but whose parents didn't?), but there was no abuse. But apparently the real story wasn't exciting enough for Penn. In case you couldn't tell, I don't really care for Sean Penn, as a director or an actor. But that's neither here nor there. On the plus side, Alaska is very pretty.