It’s not a complete story-Stuart does not complete what he sets out to do. I craved stability and repetition, and the disconnect between book and film unsettled me on some subconscious and not terribly accessible level.īut Stuart Little, the book, is actually quite repetitive. At that time, I wasn’t far removed from the season I spent alternately eating french fries and chicken nuggets from Wendy’s Kids’ Meals, to the despair of my mother.

( Back to the Future was the only American film series my brother was into in the eighties while growing up in France.) I was far from the champion of pragmatic book to film adaptations that I am now. Night Shamayalan! There, go win your local trivia night in my name.) In fact, that film may have been my first introduction to Fox-I distinctly remember watching Back to the Future for the first time in middle school-despite his sainted status in my childhood home. (If I had a journal from childhood that I was going to edit for public consumption, my only footnote would be “?”.)Īnd, of course, the vague unease that this wasn’t like the 1999 film, featuring the soothing voice of Michael J. My memories about the book itself do not feature the acquisition of the book, just fevered deliberation over whether or not it was ethical to take a borrowed book into the bathroom. (Non-literature classes, alas, had to forgo the book, but the point still stands.) This is how I assume Stuart Little came into my tiny, furious hands as a child. Assign the book and watch the movie: the lesson plan writes itself. Luckily, the nineties offered the school teachers of America easy ways to fill at least two class periods with watching films based on classic children’s books- Matilda and Stuart Little among them.

Given the political nonfiction that overwhelmed Fort McBride’s libraries, the bulk of my childhood reading actually came from school. It is a truth I do not like to acknowledge that I was not actually much of a reader as a kiddo, although I staunchly identified myself as such. Honestly, I do try to vary my audiobooks, but, since I try to only revisit books I read before I was eighteen, I’m starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel after five years of book blogging.

Stuart little book version