From the PIE list: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne (Book n Movie Review)

(Beware... long review on the way!)

This is one of those books that languished in the famous TBR, and would have remained there longer, if not for the fact that suddenly I began to see this title all over the blogosphere last month. And so I picked this one, already well aware of the debate around this book - something about a shocker happening at some point, a genuinely moving perspective vs an outrageously immature narrator. So, I should admit that some of my motivation to read this book was to find out what the whole debate was about, the same way you go to read a controversial article just to know what everyone in Twitter is ranting about. And that probably ended up coloring my reaction to this book as well, or maybe I might have still received the book in the same way. I wanted to review this one right after I read it, but eventually I decided to unconsciously or semi-consciously let my mind dwell on this book and figure out how exactly I felt.

Bruno, a German boy, returns home one day to find his maid, Maria packing his stuff. His mother explains that they are temporarily moving to another house, a fact that saddens Bruno heavily since he will miss all his friends and his big home with so many floors. His parents, his sister, Gretel (who Bruno considers a hopeless case), and their support staff move to their new, much smaller house. Bruno is very disappointed with his new place - especially the lack of friends and the fact that there's not much to explore around. That changes though when he finds a way out to the distant camp that he can see from his window, where he becomes friends with another boy named Shmuel.

Bruno is a nine-year old child. Except, he doesn't act it. He was too innocent for his age, which is fine, because isn't innocence a good thing? Probably, he is too naive and there are kids like that too. So I was fine with accepting that Bruno acts younger than his age, except that there are times he acts too old as well. And that's when it started bothering me. I couldn't make sense of him. Even quirkiness and eccentricity are character attributes, but in this case, it just wasn't that. I didn't feel that the author did a great job with his character. It appeared to me that Bruno was just a tool to move the story along and he behaves differently each time based on how the story should move.

When Bruno moves into his new home, he is very happy that he has a window in his room, but when he looks out through it, he sees a "farm" in the distance with thousands and thousands of people, all wearing the same pajama clothes. But when he asks his parents about it, they are very tight-lipped. His father talks in circles about humans vs non-humans, while his mother is very disapproving. I found it very hard to accept that the two parents who wanted to shield Bruno from the great tragedy outside, would give him the room that provides a free first class ticket to the camp and its inmates. When I watched this on the movie, the camp is shown to be really far away and the inmates inscrutable, which was far more sensible.

Bruno loves exploring. That's what he wants to do when he grows up. And so, he manages to leave his home under the eye of his family and the many soldiers in there, and go exploring, until he reaches the camp where Shmuel, a Jewish boy is sitting, unwatched by anyone. This is clearly the Auschwitz camp. It's never stated directly, but there are plenty of hints pointing in that direction. The two boys begin a hesitant friendship and continue meeting each other at the same place almost every day. It's pretty hard to believe that there is a section of the camp unmonitored by the guards and where the shocker happens.

I have to say - this is a case where I truly enjoyed the movie and didn't like the book at all. For one thing, Bruno acts more his age in the movie. Many of the loose ends are nicely patched in the movie, while in the book, they are left to interpretation and in at least one case, made very ambiguous. I quite enjoy books with open endings, so long as they are presented as meant-to-be-left-unsolved-by-the-author. I did find that a good thing in the book, because we see things through Bruno's eyes who doesn't understand a lot of it, but we try to put things together based on his observations.

In the next paragraph, I drop a spoiler BOMB, so if you plan to read the book some time, I would advise skipping the next paragraph. (I usually don't put up spoilers in my reviews, but in this one case, it was hard to discuss this book without mentioning it.)

***Spoiler starts***
The shocker - I saw it coming very early. Once I knew there was something going to happen, I couldn't imagine anything but that happening. It still felt very sad and disturbing. As I said, it felt very unbelievable that there was a section of the fence that was open, that the two boys kept meeting each other for days without anyone finding about it, and that Shmuel could easily get supplies for Bruno. Still, it's a story. And then Bruno manages to get in, and right at that point, there's a march called. This somehow didn't go with what I'd read about how those going to be killed were chosen. Still, it's possible that exceptions were made or the kids entered the wrong group. I thought the movie again handled this particular scene better - I was able to assume that the selection (of who's going to die) was made and then the boys entered the group before every one was taken to the chambers.

Definitely a lot of assumptions.
***Spoiler ends***

I would be lying though if I didn't say that I was moved by this book. Even if I found the plot highly manipulating and unbelievable, the elements that the author meant to tackle were well presented - especially that kids, who were just beginning to understand the world and who had a totally different lens through which they looked at others and made decisions - kids like Bruno and Shmuel - were still victims of the war in different ways. I appreciated how he showed that their rules for friends is so very different from an adult's. That actually took me back to my war-free school years, when I would have arguments with my parents on who can or cannot be my friend. I basically liked how he put an everyday child into one of history's most tragic event and showed how the child will still remain a child.

But... there's only so much suspending of belief that I can do.

Over the past few weeks, after seeing this book on many blogs, I've read plenty of varying viewpoints. It's a great thing that a book can be discussed this much and raise different sentiments in different people. I did try to accept that this was a book written for a young audience and maybe some tightening was needed. But then I read Number the Stars the very next week, and that made that assumption moot. Besides, I would even question whether this book can be grasped all that well by a young audience, because there are a lot of assumptions made and nothing is told straight - some knowledge of WW2 and the holocaust is needed.

I borrowed this book from the library and rented the movie from Netflix.

Book n Movie Review: The Freedom Writers' Diary by Erin Gruwell and the Freedom Writers

I'm sure one of these days she's going to go to principal and ask for her leave, but then again, what else is new?

"These kids are going to make this lady quit the first week," my friends were saying. Someone else said, "She'll only last a day."

I give her a month.

I first heard of this book in Sheila's blog when she reviewed this during the Banned Books week last year. At that point, I wasn't too keen on reading the book, but when I saw the movie pop up in my Netflix recommendations list, I decided to check it out. I didn't have too many expectations from it, but by the end of the movie, I loved it. Who doesn't love a rebel? And I mean a good rebel -- someone who succeeds in something when everyone else expected him/her to fail. The movie was everything about changing your destiny, and all through my life, I've never tolerated the 'fate' and 'destiny' philosophies that anyone dished out to me. I like to believe that I'm the only person who can control my life -- of course there's the butterfly effect and then there is the case where someone else's actions can affect what happens to you, but they are usually single events, and most times, one can always decide one's reactions to such events. Would you rather wallow in depression because you are going through a life-changing mess or would you rather change the way you respond to that mess?

The Freedom Writers' Diary is the strongest proof I've seen about how you can make a difference to your life and to those around you. All the kids in Erin Gruwell's class have already been written off as failures, by other teachers, other students, and even their own parents. Worse, none of the kids could identify with Erin -- a white woman staying in a safe suburban residence, with no teaching experience and who had no idea of life in the violent gang-controlled streets of LA. Since even their previous teachers had given up on them, they gave Erin just a month before they believed she would move on.

The following 300-odd pages of this book shows so well how every single student has been transformed by Erin's teaching methods, the students' life experiences, their choices and willingness to perhaps hope that maybe they'll come through it all fine. So many stories in the book are moving. There's the student who's the sole caretaker of the family and is on the verge of eviction because he/she has to pay 800 bucks in rent and the car payment is also due. Then the girl who had a really wonderful family life at one point and within a few years, the mother left, the father remarried to a woman she and her siblings couldn't adjust to; soon they moved to an aunt's place who loved her a lot until her lover returned from the jail and the kids were back to square one -- homeless and family-less. There's the boy whose family doesn't have a home to stay in because they are so poor. There's the girl whose parents stole her stuff so that they can fund their drug addiction. There's also the girl who had to bring herself up because her mother was tired of being a mother. There's the boy whose father doesn't think his son will succeed and offers no hope or encouragement. 

So many of the diary entries make you really sad, but by the end of each entry, I still smiled because the kids weren't writing with despair, they were writing with hope. They made promises to themselves and expressed their gratitude that they at least still had the Freedom Writers. Erin Gruwell and her class were a symbol of hope for all these kids. It's beautiful reading about how these kids change and how they do and wish good for others too. Their hostility is very evident in the initial diary entries, but as I read, I could vividly see the changes happening. It's also a reminder that just because a kid walks around with a gun or a knife, it doesn't mean that they are bad. It means they need help and there are no adults offering them that.

I've never had a teacher like Erin Gruwell, but then I've never been in a challenged class like Erin's. Still, every school needs someone like her -- if not to help those 'written-off' kids, then to at least empathize with the kids in their class. All kids have problems -- maybe not as tragic as the circumstances of the kids in this book, but certainly important problems that can have far-reaching consequences later on in life.

If four years ago someone would have told me that Ms. G was going to last more than a month, I would have laughed straight in their face. She wasn't supposed to make it, we weren't supposed to make it. But look at us now, the sure-to-drop-out kids are sure to reach higher education. No one would have thought of the "bad-asses" as high school graduates -- as any kind of graduates. Yet, in four years we will be college graduates. Our names will be on the alumni lists of Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, and even Harvard.

I loved both the movie and the book -- both are remarkably similar in plotline, but the book is just a bunch of numbered diary entries (you never know the identity of most kids and that lends a poignant innocent feel to the book). In the movie, there are some characters that are more central to the storyline. I loved all the actors who portrayed the students. They really got well into the skin of their characters. The movie also gives a personal look into Erin's life, which is not present in the book. As I understand it, the movie also used Erin's memoir to put together the various threads. I will recommend both the movie and the book to you -- they are both well-done. If like me, you aren't feeling motivated to read the book, you should certainly watch the movie then. I promise that you'll be checking out the book the very next day.

I borrowed this book from the library and rented the movie from Netflix.

Book n Movie Review: Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane/Martin Scorsese

She smiled darkly and shook her head. "I'm not crazy. I'm not. Of course what else would a crazy person claim? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it all. If you're not crazy but people have told the world you are, then all your protests to the contrary just underscore their point. Do you see what I'm saying?"

My very first introduction to Dennis Lehane was through the movie, Mystic River. At that point, I didn't know the movie was based on a book, but when I did come across the book many years later, I knew I had to read it. Now I have a huge tome of Mystic River staring at me every time I look at my shelf. It's not that I'm not keen on reading it, I'm terrified. One, because it's huge. Second, because I never really understood the movie, Mystic River, and had to read reviews and spoilers to actually know what it was about. I assume the book is the same. So instead, when I saw Shutter Island at an airport bookstore, after browsing through the shelves for 15 minutes (making me almost late for my boarding), I decided to risk it. At best, I'll enjoy it. At worst, I'll sleep.

Book n Movie Review: The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd/Gina Prince-Bythewood

Fourteen year old Lily Owens has been tormented by the same memory since she was four - the events of the afternoon her mother died. She stays with her harsh father, T. Ray, in a peach farm in South Carolina - a father who never acknowledges her birthday, doesn't buy her anything, and is nothing like a father should be. When he wants to punish her, he makes her kneel on grits for an hour. Her only real companion is the fierce, sometimes-outspoken, black woman, Rosaleen. Then something happens that prompts Lily to leave her father and her home to a place called Tiburon along with Rosaleen. There, she stays with three black beekeeping sisters, August, June and May, who provide such delightful company and eventually helps Lily get answers to the questions with which she arrived there.

I had been putting off reading this book for so long because I knew nothing about it, and the bee-word was honestly a little repulsive. (I have serious issues with any kind of small creepy crawly fly-ly living things.) But when I requested you readers to choose a book for me to read, and you guys recommended this one, I knew I couldn't put it off anymore. And so I started reading it, wondering what the whole thing about the bees was. And should I say Thank you? Or yell or chant it? Because I just absolutely loved this book!

The Secret Life of Bees is a coming-of-age story of a girl who tries to comes to terms with what happened the day her mother died. It is also a story of how she tries to learn more about her mother, and in the process, finds some wonderful women who love her like a daughter. This is not a YA book, but with a fourteen-year old protagonist and with an abundance of innocence in the book, I would imagine it could be one.

Lily is now probably one of my favorite bookish characters. I loved her spontaneity and her close relationship to Rosaleen and the beekeeping sisters. Her presence of mind is what saves her (and Rosaleen) from possible trouble. The three sisters (or calendar sisters, as Lily liked to call them because they were named after months), are characters who, you could say, have awesome screen-presence or "page-presence". August, as the oldest, was also the most mature and sensible one. She took care of the beekeeping business, into which she initiated Lily. Although I'm no fan of bees, I actually loved reading about some of the procedures described. June, though, didn't fancy Lily much and made her dislike very obvious. As for May, she was an eccentric character who carried the sorrows of the world on her shoulders. Each time, she heard any sad news, she broke down and started crying.

The Secret Life of Bees was one quirky read. It actually reminded me of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt by Beth Hoffman, though I know it should have been the other way around, had I read this one first. Reading this book took me through such a wonderful mix of emotions. One moment I'm laughing, and the very next moment I'm sniffing my way through. One minute I'm subdued as I read, and then I'm all vehement and outrageous. I loved it! I loved that it sparked so many reactions in me!

Although I have read many books depicting racial prejudice, I still get shocked when I read about it. It's nothing new in today's world, but there is something very appalling about someone mouthing profanities at a person of a different color. It is as if you never imagined that the hatred in a person can get so disgustingly low. Lily is very frank when it comes to speaking her thoughts, so frank that she puts up a disturbing idea,

T. Ray did not think colored women were smart. Since I want to tell the whole truth, which means the worst parts, I thought they could be smart, but not as smart as me, me being white. Lying on the cot in the honey house, though, all I could think was August is so intelligent, so cultured, and I was surprised by this. That's what let me know I had some prejudice buried inside me.

I found it so very truthful, because I've noticed that those who are the staunchest to declare that they are bias-free are, in fact, not. This idea was expressed in the movie, Crash, and we've seen such hypocritical characters in many books. That Lily noticed it was the first step to a change in herself.

The South in the 60s is a time I love reading about. There was so much prejudice and reading about it makes me thankful that things are very different now to what they used to be - although so many people died in getting that freedom. For every prejudiced person, there were people like Lily and Skeeter (of The Help), who had very different perceptions, though colored by the same noticeable prejudice that Lily spoke of in the quotes above. As Lily said,

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

(By the way, Lily's curses are really cute!)

Soon after reading the book, I rented the movie, which was just as enjoyable though not as much as the book (No surprise). I loved the characters except for May. Somehow I had a very different image in mind for May. Sophie Okonedo looked childish as May, which is not how I had pictured her. Definitely not old, but definitely not too teenage-y. There is one other character in the book - Zach, whose portrayal I wasn't too happy about either. However, I loved the screentime they gave to August and Lily, during the beekeeping tasks. They were great to watch, though of course, the book gave a lot more explanation of why some things are done. The book shows Lily's dad as an absolute rascal, but I was surprised to see the movie take a more mellow line. I'm not sure what the goal was, but it sure didn't strike any points with me.

In the end, I'm really glad that I got to read this book. This is one of those I didn't expect to like but ended up loving.

Check out this book published by Penguin @ Goodreads, BetterWorldBooks, Amazon, B&N.

I bought this book with my hard-earned money.