Eighth Grade Neighbors Try to Figure Each Other Out in Flipped

It isn’t too often that I watch a movie and immediately feel compelled to read the book, but when I realized that the 2010 Rob Reiner film Flipped was adapted from a young adult novel, I knew that I would have to try to track the book down. Now that I’ve finished it, I must say that the movie is one of the closest adaptations I’ve ever seen, and yet it also manages to subtly improve on the book, which I would already say is quite good.

Bryce Loski and Julianna Baker are neighbors who have lived across the street from each other since second grade. Now it’s eighth grade, and Julianna – Juli for short – continues to harbor a not-so-secret crush on Bryce, who mostly just wishes she would go away. Before the year is out, he will have his wish, but not before coming to realize that as much as her clinginess annoys him, there’s more to Juli than meets the eye. Personal traits like her obsession with an expansive sycamore in the neighborhood and her odd habit of keeping chickens and distributing their eggs suddenly start to make more sense, especially after Bryce’s grandpa Chet begins to forge a friendship with Juli while helping her fix up the family yard. But will Bryce’s realizations come too late to fix this relationship?

Author Wendelin Van Draanen divides the book into 14 chapters, with Bryce and Juli alternating as narrators. Both are likable, though Juli is a bit more so, or at least that was my perception. I certainly find it easier to relate to her position of really liking someone and not being sure of his feelings than to Bryce’s of trying to evade a relentless pursuer without being rude. Juli does go a little overboard with her public affections at times, and you would think that it wouldn’t take six whole years for her to decide that Bryce flat-out isn’t interested, but then being smitten with someone does have a tendency to reduce one’s ability to think logically. While her behavior sometimes put my sympathies with Bryce, I generally preferred her gently artistic voice to Bryce’s rather flip tone. Still, one of the best things about the book is seeing their different takes on the same situation.

Reading the book really made me appreciate what a good adaptation the movie is. There’s very little in the novel that doesn’t come across in the film. I would say Juli’s brothers and dog are slightly more integral to the plot of the book, but there’s nothing significant lost in translation there. I do find it curious that her brother Mike becomes Mark in the movie while her brother Matt retains his name, but that’s a minor issue.

I do think that it was a smart idea to change the setting from the early 2000s to the 1960s; the characters feel more at home there, and elements like a backyard chicken coop and a fundraiser involving auctioning off picnic lunches with mortified eight-grade boys seems to fit better with that era, while the bubblegum soundtrack reflects with the innocence of first love. In the book, the setting is fairly ambiguous until about three-fourths of the way through. It’s not hugely important, but I think making the time period more integral to the story improves it.

While I generally think the narrative voices are effective, at times Van Draanen seems as though she can’t decide if her characters are writing from the perspective of the end of eighth grade or are just speaking immediately as things happen. There’s a lot of present tense in the book, and while I guess it’s there mostly for emphasis, it does muddle the narrative a bit when it comes to the protagonists’ degree of self-reflection. I would go so far as to say that it is definitely inconsistent at times. For instance, Bryce tells us in the beginning that eighth grade is almost over, but when he first mentions his grandpa, he says that as far as he can tell, “the thing he likes to do best is stare out the front-room window.” This would be a fair initial observation, but Bryce knows his grandpa much better by the end of eighth grade. A couple of tense changes would probably clear up the problem, but as it stands it’s a little contradictory.

The book is a quick read at just over 200 pages, and it’s an enjoyable one. However, this is one case in which skilled screenwriters – Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman – took a promising story and, without changing much, managed to polish it up and make it truly shine for the screen. I recommend the book. However, while I don’t often say this, given the choice between reading and watching Flipped, I would advise watching the movie. Hopefully you’ll flip for it just like I did.