{"id":7005,"date":"2013-07-26T00:01:35","date_gmt":"2013-07-26T04:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=7005"},"modified":"2025-06-17T14:08:20","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T18:08:20","slug":"book-to-film-finally-tiger-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2013\/07\/book-to-film-finally-tiger-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Book to Film (Finally!): Tiger Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There comes a time in the average tween-or-teenaged American girl’s life where she meets Judy Blume, and falls in love. She picks up Blubber<\/em><\/a>, or Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret<\/em><\/a>, or Just As Long As We’re Together<\/em><\/a>, and she realizes that there is an author who just gets how she feels, and knows how her friendships work and how her parents act. Almost every woman I know, of every age, race and creed, has read (and loved!) Judy Blume. Judy Blume is universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so it is shocking to consider that before this year, none of her truly wonderful novels aimed at the under-18 set have ever been adapted into films. With Hollywood’s recent fascination with YA novels, you’d think it would be a no-brainer, but you would think wrong. Blume’s first novel to make it to the big screen, Tiger Eyes<\/em><\/a>, premiered on June 7 in extremely limited release and on VOD. You can watch it on Itunes <\/a>right now!<\/p>\n\n\n

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Tiger Eyes<\/em><\/a> was first published in 1981. The story centers on a young girl named Davey whose world is rocked when her father is gunned down at the family convenience store in a robbery-gone-awry. Davey’s mother falls apart and the family moves in with controlling relatives in New Mexico, as Davey struggles to recover from her own crushing grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is the portrayal of that grief that makes this novel such an enduring classic. Neither shlocky nor overwrought, Davey’s pain is real, and as a reader you feel it with her. How does one make sense of the incomprehensible? When you throw in realistic family dynamics and a cute, mysterious boy named Wolf, you have the ingredients for a great story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film <\/a>was written by the author and her son and directed by that same son, Lawrence Blume. I always like when an author gets to write their own movie script. Not only does the resulting story tend to be light-years closer to the book in question, when changes are made it’s fun to speculate why the author made that decision. For example, in the film there is a much stronger emphasis on Davey’s relationship with Wolf than there was in the novel. This shifted the focus of the story away from the family dynamics for longer periods of time, as we learned more about Wolf and his culture. Still, my inner 15 year-old was thrilled when Wolf and Davey kissed, so I wouldn’t say this was a bad development!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I hope that this film is just the first of many Blume adaptations to come. If you have a sensitive tween or teen in your life (or at your library!) this is definitely one to watch. And if the sensitive tween lives inside you, so much the better. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There comes a time in the average tween-or-teenaged American girl’s life where she meets Judy Blume, and falls in love. She picks up Blubber, or Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, or Just As Long As We’re Together, and she realizes that there is an author who just gets how she feels, and knows how her friendships work and how her parents act. Almost every woman I know, of every age, race and creed, has read (and loved!) Judy Blume. Judy Blume is universal. And so it is shocking to consider that before this year, none of her truly wonderful novels aimed at the under-18 set have ever been adapted into films. With Hollywood’s recent fascination with YA novels, you’d think it would be a no-brainer, but you would think wrong. Blume’s first novel to make it to the big screen, Tiger Eyes, premiered on June 7 in extremely…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":153,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[236,22,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-elisabeth-gattullo","category-childrens-literature","category-evaluation-of-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/153"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}