Two things that make me happy: The King's Speech and XVI
1. I finally saw "The King's Speech."
What a fabulous movie!
All the buzz about performances deserving the Academy Awards is true. You immediately feel empathy for Bertie, the man who never expected to have to be in the spotlight and make speeches despite his stammering, never mind leading a nation through a World War.
Some of you may know that I briefly flirted with the possiblity of an alternative career as a speech therapist, as a way to supplement my income from writing. I went back to university to take postgraduate courses to get into the Speech Therapy I didn't last long in the course because I couldn't keep up with the competition in Statistics and its Bell Curve of Doom and I struggled with the general sciences. So I dropped out. But I'm still interested in speech therapy. I so could have written this movie!
I laughed, I got a lump in my throat, I cheered King George on.
I hope that Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter and the director and producers clean up at the Oscars.
2.
XVI by Julia Karr
Speak, 2011.
Available from your local bookstore or at Amazon
Tag line: In the future, innocence expires at sixteen.
Julia is on my friends list and I've been eagerly anticipating this book. I especially enjoyed Julia's worldbuilding. She casually throws in slang terms of futuristic devices and lets you figure it out from the context. This is brave writing that requires trust in the reader's intelligence. While there are a few of these things that made me go "Oh, cool!" this is an overwhelmingly dystopian version of life in Chicago in 2150.
The protagonist, Nina, is about to turn sixteen, with all the ominous consequences that entails. I don't want to talk too much about the plot and spoil it, so I'll just say that it reminded me a bit of Orwell's 1984 and of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. As in the best science fiction, XVI's version of 2150 is a deft social criticism of today's political system and governmental influence. It includes a list of discussion questions at the back.
Congrats, Julia!
juliakarr