Okay, we all remember how much I loved the movie Whip It, right? Derby Girl by Shauna Cross is the book that it was adapted from. It’s particularly interesting to look at the two in comparison, because Shauna wrote the screenplay, and there is a very strong structural similarity between the two versions.

The first impulse is always to point out the things that the film failed to do that were awesome in the books. Because the book came first, right? So it must be better. But when the same author wrote first, then it’s easy to see ways in which the film perhaps is the next upgrade, and might improve upon the original text.

The good news is that both Whip It and Derby Girl (now released in some places under the same title as the movie, for obvious reasons) are really, really good. Whip It perhaps benefits from being an incredibly rare thing – an awesome film for teenage girls which combines healthy messages with non stop entertainment – while Derby Girl is, quite frankly, one of a huge wealth of brilliant YA novels that do the same thing.

The thing I love most about the book that didn’t quite make it into the film (though Ellen Page manages a few good wisecracks) is the inner voice of Bliss – funny, slangy, immersed in her own world where pop culture is only cool if it’s also ironic, everything in her hick town sucks, and the greatest tragedy in life is that going out with a boy in a band is never gonna turn out well. The prose is concise and tightly-written. The chapters are tiny and each one packs a punch.

I can get behind  buymeaclue‘s concise review “Too much boyfriend. Not enough roller derby.” but only because, yes, more roller derby would have been awesome (the boyfriend plot is pretty restrained). Then again, it’s a very slender book, and not many words wasted. The plot is a little uneven, with many details seeded without ultimately being relevant, and a VERY neatly tied up ending, but it rings with a dynamic authenticity.

The film definitely expands on elements of the book that are lacking: the mother’s journey into accepting who her daughter is (and for that matter, the father’s) actually has more time than in the novel. The team story is more interesting because their underdog status is plottier, as is their relationship with the coach. The boyfriend story has a different interpretation in a couple of scenes which makes it a touch more complex and interesting. We see more of the characters, and of course we get to SEE Roller Derby in all its bruised, smash-em-up glory instead of just reading about it on the page.

While I loved Alia Shawkat’s portrayal of Pash in the film, on reading the book I did think it was a shame they couldn’t find a darker-skinned actress to play the “beautiful Arab-American bombshell” best friend – though a quick survey of Wiki revealed that Shawkat does at least have Iraqi heritage, and is playing an Arab-American in another film. That’s kind of awesome, as I was thinking very uncharitable things about the film when I read this detail in the book!

All in all, both works are pretty damn good, and there is a pleasure in reading both in companion to each other. If nothing else, I’m crazy about adaptations that borrow closely from the book, and this is a text-book case of a movie that gets it right, and even manages to add layers that aren’t in the book. If Derby Girl is a slightly uneven but fiery first novel, then Whip It! was the chance for the author to present a more mature, confident work.

One detail that was a touch hard to get used to in the book is that some of the names of characters were changed around – film Maggie Mayhem is actually called Malice in Wonderland in the book, and the insipid, 2-dimensional bitch character Dinah Might from the book is reinvented in the film as the glorious, not-enough-screen-time Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis). I was deeply sad that there wasn’t a Smashlee Simpson in the book either (heh that has to be my favourite Drew Barrymore character ever). Discovering in the author’s bio that Shauna Cross herself plays roller derby as the original Maggie Mayhem made me bizarrely happy, though…

All in all, it’s a great, very readable book, and it has raw edges to it that were softened for the film, but the film brings more iconic, developed versions of so many characters beyond than Bliss. The awesome thing is that I don’t really have to choose – I can keep both!

Tags: reading, watching, YA