To Whom It May Concern

The Words That Move You

I enjoy books, even though I probably don't read as much as I used to, nor as much as I should. Heck, most of my reading these days revolves around my Automobile Weekly magazine, or lesson outlines as we prep for the incoming classes at work.

I was watching the movie Bridge To Tarabithia, I've seen it before, and while it is an okay feature, as is with many other movies, it fails to really do the book any justice. I can remember seeing the trailer and commercials for the movie and thinking "WTF" because they didn't seem to accurately reflect anything from the book. Thankfully the commercials themselves really didn't the movie itself justice, and it was laughable how 'outraged' parents were who expected the movie to be about a fantasy world, when in fact that only explains maybe 5 minutes of the movie overall.

While watching the movie again, I thought about how I rarely have any emotional response to books I read, but that the Bridge To Tarabithia was one of three books I can remember that did so. In my defense, I was in junior high when I read these books. The other two were Where The Red Fern Grows, and an obscure short story that not many have heard about, The Scarlet Ibis.

Did the Tarabithia movie make me feel that way? Nah, in fact they changed some of what, I think, were pretty important aspects of the book when the movie was made. In the book, when the boy comes home from a day he spent with his teacher, he sees everyone sitting in the living room, very somber, and his older sister, (who was very mean in the book, not reflected in the movie either), crudely announces "Your girlfriend is dead". In the book that was a much more crushing blow, like someone just kicks you in the stomach so hard that it knocks you down, and you aren't able to breathe for several moments. I was reading the book for an English class, so at first it was like "Blah, okay, I have to read it" but by the end I really did enjoy the book.