I’ve been meaning to tell you about this beautiful book I finished reading about three weeks ago - Peony in Love by Lisa See. I’d seen it at the bookstore several times and finally bought it when it was on the buy one, get one half price table. It is not really a love story, but a story about love and what love is. Absolutely wonderful, like reading a dream.
I do have one confession. At one point in the story, fairly early, I stopped reading temporarily - call it a lapse in faith. I picked it up again, though and finished it in one, very long sitting. If you read, or have read, the book you can probably guess at what point I almost gave up.
That was the good. The bad is what “they” did to another of my favorite books, The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. I finally got the movie on Netflix. I knew not to expect much because it didn’t even get to the theatres in my home town and I saw maybe one ad for it - an obvious indication of a bad movie. Oh My Gosh! It was terrible. How terrible, you might ask? Bad enough that I couldn’t finish watching it; and that says a lot. Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanssen were fine, they just couldn’t do a thing with the plot or the dialogue.
The problem is that the director tried to cover the story as a whole, hitting highlights here and there. The book is actually about family - the three Boleyns - how family is defined, how duty to family changes them (and England) and, for Anne and George at least, takes everything from them. Mary manages to escape because she is faithful to her own family - her husband and children, rather than to the Howard and Boleyn families. If the writer and director had taken this view of the story, it would have been much more cohesive and interesting.
