Off The Shelf: Summer Movies Spring From The Pages

The following was submitted by Izzi Abrams: 

How many times have you thought that a certain book would be a great movie? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  Here are a few upcoming suggestions: 

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay is a story based on the 1942 roundups at Velodrome d’Hiver and the deportations of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz. Narrated by a journalist, Julia Jarmond, the story focuses on a young girl named Sarah who together with her family lived in the wartime apartment that Julia and her husband are now to purchase.  Julia begins to uncover the hidden secrets of Sarah and her family as well as those of her husband‘s family and opens a door to a little known aspect of the Holocaust.

The film version of this powerful novel premiered on July 22, 2011 and stars Kristin Scott Thomas. You can catch it on August 5, at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge. 

On August 10 The Help, a novel by Kathryn Stockett which rocked the book group world, will premier as a movie starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis, and Octavia Spencer. The author’s first novel is set in Mississippi in the early 1960s. Each chapter is narrated by one of the main characters. We learn about their lives- Skeeter, a young white woman who is a budding social activist and writer who begins to collect the stories of the black women working as maids in the community, Abileen, a maid who has raised 16 children, and her best friend Minny who finds herself being laid off because of mouthing off to her white employers. This is a rich novel, a book filled with heart and history.  You can even feel the warm hazy days of Jackson, Mississippi. You still have time to read it before the debut of the film. 
 

I Don’t Know How She Does It is the first novel of British writer Allison Pearson, published in 2002. Narrated by Kate Reddy, the main character, we are drawn into her world of trying to balance her professional life as the manager of a hedge fund and the mother of two small children. Scheduling her life has become overwhelming, and while she seems to manage at work her house and her family are falling apart. It is a delightful, humorous, fast moving story of a contemporary woman who is trying to have it all.   

Watch for this film starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Pierce Brosnan, and Kelsey Grammer premiering on September 16, 2011. 

Hope you enjoy!