BOOKS VS ???: Books and Musicals

I am so excited to welcome Kenya from Booked Up and Bossy today!  She is here to share a fabulously fun pairing, but I will let her tell you more about it!  Read on . . . 

-------------------------

Thanks to Book Bloggers International for doing a month of posts focused on pairings. It gave me the chance to think about my two loves together. I love musical theatre. I love books. BOOM!

A lot of musicals were based on books, so if you enjoyed one of these popular shows, reading the original text isn’t a terrible idea. Though tread lightly, because just like when your favorite book becomes a movie (just say no, y’all) there are often many things reinterpreted to fit a different audience.

For the sake of brevity, I picked three of my favorite musicals for this guest post, because once I got started, I kind of got carried away and we don’t have time for that. At least, they were my favorite before I saw The Color Purple two weeks ago, which basically blew me away. You can expect another musical- book pairing post over at my blog soon.

All right. Let’s start with something easy:

WICKED

Theme: Old characters in new situations, or there’s more than one side to everyone’s story.

Wicked is a retelling of the Wizard of Oz story that tells a bit about the witches as children and teens and about how they met. They grew up with different families and different ambitions which really change their experiences and options as they get older. An obvious book to read is Wicked, the book on which this musical is based. I have to tell you, I didn’t care for it. But my love of the musical makes me want to go back and give it another try. Another obvious choice is ANY OTHER OF THE MILLION stories about Dorothy and Oz. A great one is Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Page. I loved the whole series.

Less Obvious: Chris Colfer’s The Land of Stories is another great choice if you enjoy fantasy and seeing old favorite characters in a new light. These books are fun and sunny, written for middle graders. They follow twins as they discover they can enter into the land of the fairy stories their grandmother read to them as children.

Ok… my Even Less Obvious book pairing is The MadWoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell. This is the story of a girl who grows up knowing she is the last descendant of the Bronte sisters and her father, now deceased, was basically obsessed. The world thinks the family is hiding the vast Bronte fortune.  The main character knows everything about the Brontes and her father until she goes to school to live in the old tower he lived in.

MATILDA

Theme: Girls overcoming hard situations and finding their strength (especially against jerk adults).

Matilda is a musical about a 5- year- old bookworm who is neglected by her television- obsessed father and her ball-room dancing obsessed mother.  She teaches herself to read and spends as much time as possible reading through every book at the local library and telling stories to the librarian. She has started telling a story about great circus performers, finds a loving adult in her teacher, and finds an inner power to defeat her mean old principal. Can I tell you that I LOVED LOVED LOVED the sets and musical and just IT ALL about this show.

The Most Obvious book to read if you love this musical is Roald Dahl’s original book. There is no parallel story of the circus performers but the story is quick and cute.

Less obvious: Seraphina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty is a book about a girl who lives in the basement of a large estate on which her father works on electrical equipment. She doesn’t know why she’s a secret or anything about the rest of her family. She lives there in secret and has perfected the art of being invisible and unseen. But, then, something terrible happens and she has to come out of hiding and find the power to overcome a great darkness, the Black Cloak.

An Even Less Obvious book, if you loved the themes in Matilda, is Dime by E.R. Frank. Dime is a young teen girl who lives in poverty and the general rough life it brings. When she meets a man who says he loves her, she joins his girls who bring money into the family by working the streets. Because she’s smart, she is promoted to helping her man start working a bigger hustle. Dime has to find a way to get herself out of the messiest situation ever and get back to herself.

HEATHERS

Theme: The stuff girls do to stay on top.

Heather the Musical was based on the movie from 1988 starring 80’s cult classic stars Winona Ryder and Christian Slater both of whom later got into trouble and then dropped off the planet, I think. Anyway, the musical is about Veronica. She’s a high schooler in a school where everyone is shitty to everyone else and the three most popular girls are all named Heather. She joins their little group but hates how she has to cower to the lead Heather’s power. And then she meets a boy with fewer morals and a bad case of untreated complicated grief.

The three books that I think pair with this musical are all basically about teenagers who look really together but are really just not.

The Luckiest Girl Alive by Jennifer Knoll is told from the perspective of now- adult Ani, who is going back to her prestigious private school to talk to a reporter about “the thing that happened” when she was in school there. In trying to fit in with the popular rich kids she lost much, but she’s never really been able to tell people about everything she went through or what exactly happened on the day the school really got the shock of its life.

Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight is a wonderful book about a girl who was in over her head at school. Her mother, Kate, comes to get her from school, where she has been accused of cheating, and Amelia is dead by the time she gets there. Kate is sifting through the remains of Amelia’s life to figure out what Amelia was involved in and if she ever really knew her daughter at all.

A less obvious book pairing is the haunting The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma. I don’t really want to say too much about this one. One, because it’s been a while since I read it and I’m sure I’ll mix up the details and two, because there are a few twists and turns that make this one worth reading even with only a little info.