Snowy Stories: Let It Snow, the book and the movie
It’s beginning to look like Christmas! In this episode we get a little bit festive as we chat about Let It Snow, the YA short story compilation by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle. It might sound a little familiar if you’re on Netflix on a regular basis; it’s been made into a movie, so we see if the 2019 adaptation lives up to the 2008 stories. Pour yourself a gingerbread latte, grab yourself some festive snacks and let’s get into it.Currently Reading
Each episode of Rants and Reviews we share what we’re currently reading, so you can discover our favourite genes, add some books to your TBR pile, and hear us rave and rage about characters, plot, setting and more.Sophie is currently reading:
- The Christmas Party by Carol Matthews
- Queen of Nothing by Holly Black
Main feature
For this episode, we’re chatting about Let It Snow, which contains three holiday romances, written by the three authors. There are characters in each story who overlap throughout, which makes it a little Love, Actually-esque. For our show notes this week, we thought we’d give you a little run down of our overall thoughts for each story, and then a little round up of the movie.(3:00) We get into the main feature, and catch about the first story in the book: The Jubilee Express, by Maureen Johnson. As well as pronunciation dilemmas, we have thoughts on the themes in this story, and while it was very sweet and cute overall, it’s best not to think too much about the details.
(14:15) The second story in the book is called A Cheerstastic Christmas Miracle, by John Green. One of our main thoughts about this story is that it doesn’t really seem like a John Green story; Anjali has read all John Green’s books, and Sophie has one more book to go. We wonder if the story didn’t really feel very John Green because it was released in 2008, and he hadn’t quite the John-Green vibe going in his stories yet. There are some funny lines in this one, however, they’re not quite on par with, for example, lines from The Fault in Our Stars.
(23:14) The final story is called The Patron Saint of Pigs by Lauren Myracle. Neither of us have read anything by Myracle before at all, and after a quick Google it looks like the majority of her stories are for kids or Middle Grade (not that we don’t read Middle Grade books, but just not any of these ones). This story was a bit odd, and it was a struggle to get through on the whole. However, the end was really fun, and all the characters from the previous stories show up and all the characters overlap.
Overall, we’ve both given the book 3 out of 5 stars; it was a fun book, and it was enjoyable, but we wouldn’t read it again.
(28:00) Now for the movie! Let It Snow was released in 2019 by Netflix, and we have thoughts. It’s always a bit of a struggle to read a book and then watch the movie because 9 times out of 10 it’s not going to live up to the book. We know this.
In Let It Snow, it seems like they took out some of the main characters, the Waffle House, the pig and used them, and then threw out the rest of the book. It was definitely based on the book, but there were so many things that were really different and things that didn’t happen in the movie, or happened in a different way that it was jarring to watch.
There was a whole lot of ‘wait wait wait, what?’ moments.
Some of the versions of the characters were cooler than the book - Anjali points out the character of TinFoil Woman is a man in the book, but in the movies it’s played by Joan Cusack and so therefore it’s automatically better than the book already.
There are some characters that don’t exist at all in the movie version, and some characters who are there but they’re very different. The main character changes happened in the first story, where the whole character changes and the way it’s done changes a lot; which was a shame because that was our favourite story.
The overall consensus of the movie was that we would have really enjoyed the movie, if we hadn’t read the book. It was a really fun movie, and the characters overlapping the way they did was neat. Would we watch the movie again? Sure. Maybe not this year, but maybe we’d watch it again next year, when the book was out of our minds.
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