(So is Janie Loomis.) Echo Kellum is understatedly winning as the new but sensitive sixth-grade teacher who picks up on Margaret’s response to a questionnaire - “I hate religious holidays” - and turns it into a yearlong assignment. From the moment the soon-to-be sixth grader utters the movie’s first prayer - which ends with the entreaty, “Please don’t let New Jersey be too horrible” - Fortson’s Margaret proves to be a protagonist who is as incidentally funny as she is authentic.Ĭraig also broadens the novel’s reach.
In her face, Margaret’s glimmers of dawning self-awareness and hurt ring true. Kathy Bates is Margaret’s paternal grandmother, Sylvia, of the aforementioned blurt.īut it is Abby Ryder Fortson who carries the day, or rather the school year. Rachel McAdams and Benny Safdie portray Margaret’s youthful parents, Barbara and Herb. Brooks assembled a cast that delivers the joys and blunders waiting at the edge of childhood but also touches on the pangs of other kinds of growing up. It doesn’t hurt that Craig and the producer James L. The director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig’s rendering of the book about puberty, family and nascent spirituality offers lessons in how a cherished object, when treated with tender and thoughtful regard, needn’t turn precious. And so begins the yearlong adventure at the heart of this pitch-perfect adaptation of the author Judy Blume’s “ Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” Why? Because she and her parents are moving to New Jersey, her grandmother blurts out before her folks can ease their only child into the news. The creamy textured pages were a pleasure to touch and turn.It is 1970 and the almost-12-year-old Margaret Simon returns from summer camp to boxes strewn about her family’s jammed New York City apartment. So as an undercover book dealer I can say I thoroughly enjoyed Runt. As parents and friends, we smuggle books these days through the hell-pass of electronic devices and into the world of our children’s beautiful minds. A major obstacle for Annie to overcome is that Runt can only perform when nobody is looking.Īnother hallmark of children’s literature is that it must entertain the adults. Runt is fast, nimble and loves to herd the shearers’ sheep. To break the impasse of their poverty, Annie seizes upon an opportunity to pay the “overdraft on the overdraft” by entering Runt in a lucrative dog-agility competition to be held in London. While Annie lives with her family on a drought-affected sheep farm, it becomes apparent that money worries aside, her mum is a frustrated fashion designer, dad a frustrated horticulturist and teenage brother a frustrated Evel Knievel. Craig Silvey has written a delicious novel about an 11-year-old girl and her dog, Runt.
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