Book Review(ish): The Breadwinner

Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner has been on my radar for ages and seeing the movie finally gave me a push to actually read it. And I’m glad I did! Like the movie, it’s good - and it’s different enough from the movie to make it worthwhile to read it, as well.

In particular, the book doesn’t have the story-within-a-story that Parvana tells her family in the movie. I loved that aspect in the movie and I missed it - but at the same time, its absence gives Ellis time to develop a subplot featuring an old friend of Parvana’s mother’s, who moves in with the family after Parvana’s father is arrested and gets Parvana’s mother involved in writing a clandestine magazine about the plight of Afghan women.

This is also an excellent subplot. And it’s interesting to see how much switching out one subplot changes the story: the movie is more tightly focused on Parvana’s inner experience, while the book (even though it’s entirely in Parvana’s POV, just like the movie) gives a fuller picture of the political situation in Afghanistan and of attempts (however small) to fight against it.

Both book and movie end on somewhat indeterminate notes. In the book, this is clear sequel bait - it doesn’t end so much as cut off - whereas in the movie, it’s something of an act of mercy; the story is stopping at this open-ended but somewhat hopeful point, because that might well be the happiest moment at which to end it. Things may not get better from here.

The book version of The Breadwinner has three sequels. I think I am going to have to read them.

Dude

I wanted something relaxing to watch after an evening of hard-core cooking, so I started watching the Netflix original movie Dude. The preview pictures led me to believe it would be a fairly light-hearted look at four girls’ friendship during the last weeks of high school. HA. In the first, Lily's boyfriend Thomas (who is the brother of Lily's best friend, Chloe) dies in a car crash.

Fast forward a year. Lily is now in charge of senior prom. Multiple characters tell her that she needs to let go of her need for control, delegate, loosen up, etc. There’s an execrable sequence where one of her fellow student council members asks her to prom by singing her a song, accompanied by ukulele, during a student council meeting, with the connivance of the teacher. Lily, horrified, ends the meeting and flees.

But then! But then! Later on, Lily apologizes to him: “I was such a bitch,” she says. HOW DARE SHE HAVE NOT INSTANTLY SAY YES WHEN A GUY SHE DOESN’T WANT TO DATE SINGS TO HER ON A UKULELE IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE STUDENT COUNCIL. HOW VERY DARE. What a manipulative bullshit move on his part. He’s arranged it so she HAS to say yes or she’ll look mean.

Just to drive this point home, when Lily tells her best friend Chloe about it, Chloe is all, “That’s so sweet!” Thanks for nothing, Chloe. (Chloe secretly wants to go to prom with a guy rather than together with Lily as friends, not that she’s told Lily this. Chloe’s main character note seems to be “vaguely resenting Lily for not knowing things that Chloe hasn’t told her.” I loathe Chloe.)

At this point I decided to look up reviews online to see if this story was going the way that I thought it was going, viz, Lily is going to learn some Very Important Lessons about not being bossy a control freak, probably by having the prom she has labored so hard for go terribly wrong, and also by having her best friend Chloe sneakily back out on their plans to go to college close to each other.

I did not learn if either of those two things happen. My money’s on yes, but I’m not watching the rest to find out, because in the course of checking out reviews I discovered ( spoilers )

Someday I want to read a book or watch a movie or just in general experience a piece of media about a woman who is a complete control freak and the narrative never tries to teach her a lesson about it at all even slightly.

So I stopped half an hour into the movie. Did not enjoy, do not recommend.