Paramount Pictures has chosen Rebecca Thomas to serve as the director of the Looking For Alaska adaptation. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, the screenwriting duo behind The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns films, will return to write the script for this project.
John Green, the author behind this popular young adult novel, confirmed the news about Thomas’ hiring with an announcement on his social media pages. Recently, he wrote a blog post detailing the complicated relationship he has with the idea of a Looking For Alaska movie because “the story is so personal and I know it’s also an important story to lots of readers.”
Here’s more from Deadline.com: “The protagonist of the novel is Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter, who leaves his boring life behind, heads off to the Culver Creek Boarding School, and finds adventure and some danger because of his new friend Alaska Young, a gorgeous, funny, sexy and self-destructive catalyst for a life change in a daring new direction. After the outsized gross of The Fault In Our Stars and the buzz on the upcoming Nat Wolff-Cara Delevingne-starrer Paper Towns, Green’s young-adult allure has made him as bankable an author as there is right now.” (via Variety.com)
A few years ago, during fellowship hour at my church, a friend and her daughter began describing their most recent literary adventure. They'd driven to New York, they said, to see John Green read. The line to get in was at least a block long. When the crowd finally fully compacted, when it contained its excitement and hushed, John Green wasn't just the funny, smart, wonderful, warm writer my friend and her daughter thought he would be. He was infinitely better than that.
I believe it. Like Libba Bray, John Green emanates a good Bigness, not just of talent, but of spirit. Travels to his
web site yield a glimpse of a guy whose humor, occasional gentle self-mockery, and unabashed love for World Cup Soccer have remained intact, through the tsunami of his success. If you had a chance to visit readergirlz during their
John Green month, you'd find the man waving with both hands, talking up playlists, and jiving his way through his infamous tweets (he hates the term social media, apparently, but he's textbook good at it). If you've read any of his books, or even just the acknowledgments in his books, or maybe the extras in his books, you get the aforementioned good Bigness.
This morning I've been reading the book that launched Green's career,
Looking for Alaska, because it is a good thing, I think, to go back to the beginning with authors, to remember what was first for them, the platform that they built from. Everything is right about this book—the tone, the relationships, the slow build of tension and mystery (slow, or fast, depending on how you take to the chapter "titles' which are all variations of "fifty-eight days before" or "one-day after").
Alaska has the intelligence of
A Separate Peace and the wit of a Salinger. It has something only this former hospital chaplain might have written about The Meaning of it All.
Green's work will, I'm certain, be around for a long time. He is an author who makes me proud to be counted among the YA writers of right now. Because Green's work is first-rate no matter what genre label you give it, and that's what YA books must be, first and foremost—well-written, thoughtful, funny if the author can swing it, capable of leaving readers psychically richer than they were.
Yesterday I spent the afternoon at the Brooklyn Book Festival where I had the pleasure of hearing YA authors Gayle Forman (If I Stay), Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls) and G. Neri (Surf Mules) talk about the challenging themes covered in their... Read the rest of this post
Looking for Alaska is John Green's first book (his second, An Abundance of Katherines, shall be reviewed forthwith). Looking for Alaska is a rather heartbreaking story. There is, of course, a boy and a girl, but there's also a boarding school and some alcohol and a suitcase labeled "COFFEE TABLE" and many last words. Miles Halter (the boy) goes to boarding school and meets Alaska (the girl) and a bunch of cool stuff happens, none of which I will tell you about, because I'm cruel. Then a Bad Thing happens, also which I will not tell you about.
Looking for Alaska is divided into two parts-- before and after-- and the chapters are named accordingly (a month before, two days before, etc). This gives the whole book a sense of inevitability. There is a Bad Thing that is about to happen, and you can see it coming, but there is nothing whatsoever that you can do about it. Of course, there is never anything that you can do to stop something that happens in a book, unless you are the author of the book, or you have magical powers, but Looking for Alaska really drives the point home. The entire first 3/4 of the book is just building up to the Bad Thing, just waiting for it to happen. And then, BAM. Bad Thing. And it hurts your soul, believe me.
Now, look at the picture of the cover. Do you see the shiny round gold thing? Yes? Good. That, dear reader, is a Printz award, which, if you don't know, is a very fancy sort of an award. Looking for Alaska won a Printz (a fact that you may have surmised from the aforementioned shiny round gold thing). Why did it win a Printz, you ask? Silly reader! I say. Because it is good! Now go, go out into the wonderful land of books and read it. I command you!
I award this book 4.5 daggers.*
Depressedly, Bad-Thing-hatingly yours,
*I should probably give it five, but there's too much drinking. Is that a legitimate reason to take away a half a dagger? Eh. Teenage drinking is annoying.
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Despite all of the teen drinking and sex and smoking, I absolutely adore this book. It is a beautiful story of love and loss and suffering. And it made me cry. It absolutely ripped my heart out. And one must love a book that can do that.
The inevitability of the Bad Thing really hits you, though.
Hits you hard.
I give it the only set of daggers that I am able: all five.
Hoping for good last words...
Warm weather, the dog days of summer, time to break out the shorts. Nothing more refreshing and cooler than lounging about, unencumbered, with plenty of free time to lounge and let the mind flicker an wander. The perfect time to snack on short stories and other collected short works.
I am opening this one to the floor because while I feel I could cover this topic myself I've found myself more
I loved Looking for Alaska, for all these reasons.
Okay, that's it. I've been saying I'm going to read some John Green and now you've convinced me. He's going straight to the top of my pile.
I saw John Green when he came to Austin with David Levithan for WILL GRAYSON, WILL GRAYSON. It was extremely memorable.
I forgot about Austin traffic and showed up fifteen minutes later than I meant to. This meant I was standing in the stairwell since the event was so packed.
But even only being able to hear what was going on, I could imagine their expressions since both of them had such forceful personalities.
Also, John Green whipped out the c-word while discussing censorship in YA, which is definitely out of the ordinary for a YA book signing.
Like you, so proud to have him in our YA world. Absolutely.
John Green is a gifted author, fabulous speaker, and I really love how he's used his success to reach teens (and adults) in a meaningful way. His work with the Harry Potter Alliance is truly heartwarming.
LOOKING FOR ALASKA is a favorite! I finally met John Green at ALA this year--total fun. And I've just started AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES. Yay!
Alaska is one of my favorites.
Argh. I have every one of his books in my house and I haven't yet read one word. Sigh.