Archive | Book Matters

Kody Keplinger, YA’s Leslie Knope

Kody Keplinger may be the Leslie Knope of Young Adult fiction. Like the “Parks and Recreation” public servant whom she adores, the unflagging Kentucky native is all about feminist positivity and five-year plans, and so far she’s right on track. As a seventeen-year-old high school senior, she wrote The DUFF, the New York Times-bestselling YA book about Bianca, a high school student who discovers she’s the “Designated Ugly Fat Friend” of her ultra-hot besties. Now at the ripe old age of twenty-three, Keplinger is a New York City resident with four more published YA novels under her belt, and The DUFF has been adapted into a smart-as-a-whip, critically acclaimed teen flick starring Mae Whitman, Bella Thorne, Allison Janney, and Ken Jeong. I talked with Mz. Knope er Keplinger about the adaptation process, size acceptance, and the genius of Mae Whitman.

Lisa Rosman: Let’s start with brass tacks. What inspired you to write The DUFF while you were still a student?

Kody Keplinger: It was hearing the word DUFF being used in my school. That is not a word I made up. Actually, I did research on this after the fact – it apparently got popular on some reality TV dating show in the early 2000s – but I first heard it my senior year, when a girl was talking about a boy as “The DUFF.” Continue Reading →

Me, Earl, the Dying Girl & Millenniamania

I have a theory that Sundance standouts are not necessarily the best films. Instead, they’re the ones that dare to be emotional, even sweet, since they offer a welcome contrast to the disaffected fare that proliferates the indie circuit. Take “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” which won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at this year’s festival. A whimsical tearjerker about Greg (Thomas Mann), a loner of a teenage filmmaker, and Rachel (Olivia Cooke), the titular dying girl, this is the stuff of which Sundance dreams are made; it even boasts a protagonist guaranteed to resonate with critics and festival-goers.

So am I indirectly saying I don’t like it? I am not. This movie is an endearing, charismatically stitched effort from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and screenwriter Jesse Andrews, who adapted his own eponymous YA novel. But it is also undeniably twee, and afflicted with the micro-aggression that continues to rage unchecked in Hollywood comedies. I can’t help but wonder if its thunderously positive early buzz stems from “Sundance Goggles,” that unique myopia caused by seeing five movies a day at very high altitudes. Continue Reading →

Taking Back ‘Rosemary’s Baby’

Ever since the Australian import “The Babadook” came out last year, I’ve been rethinking “Rosemary’s Baby,” which celebrates its forty-seventh anniversary on June 12. On the surface, a mother and child haunted by a children’s book character has little to do with Roman Polanski’s 1968 opus about a woman who’s been knocked up by the devil. But both are those rare films that herald rather than demonize mommies. From “Psycho” to “Mama” to “Alien,”  motherhood and its associated female biological functions have always loomed as the ultimate horror in American cinema. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy