BY BEATA GARRETT ’20
This year, “The Kissing Booth,” a romantic comedy on Netflix, and the supernatural thriller “Light as a Feather” were released on Netflix and Hulu. Both films started as novels on Wattpad, a website and a community for the online publication of user-generated fiction, and were subsequently published by Penguin Random House and Simon Pulse, respectively.
BY SIDNEY BOKER ’21
“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott is being adapted into a new film, set to be released in 2019. According to the New Yorker, Alcott wrote the book in 1868 after publisher Thomas Niles prompted her to write a “girls’ story.” Before “Little Women,” Alcott published thriller stories in different weekly papers under the pseudonym A.M. Barnard to help her financially-strapped family. The Alcott family consisted of Bronson, Alcott’s transcendentalist and jobless father, her mother Abba and her three sisters, who served as Alcott’s inspiration for the March sisters in “Little Women.”
BY RENN ELKINS ’20
“Circe” follows in the footsteps of “The Song of Achilles,” retelling famous threads of Greek mythology. Miller’s website describes “Circe,” a dramatized biography of the titular witch, as “a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.”
BY BEATA GARRETT ’20
Hailed as the new “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Leni Zumas’ third dystopian novel “Red Clocks” takes place in a society where abortion is newly criminalized and adoption is restricted to married couples. The novel explores the intersecting lives of four women and the ways in which they navigate society: Ro, the high school teacher and biographer who desperately wants a child; Mattie, her student who finds herself in an unwanted pregnancy; Susan, a housewife trapped in a loveless marriage and Gin, a “mender” who helps those abandoned by the health care system and finds herself on a modern-day witch trial for doing so.
BY DEANNA KALIAN ’21
Fans of George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series have been waiting impatiently for the release of the sixth and penultimate installment, “The Winds of Winter.” Martin published his most recent book in the series, “A Dance with Dragons,” in the summer of 2011, and fans have been waiting for “The Winds of Winter” ever since.
