The in Between by Marc Klein
Good morning Books Lovers,
a few days ago The In between by Marc Klein arrived in Italian bookstores, a book published by mondadori that talks about a love story cut short in the bud, beautiful and at the same time devastating with paranormal additions that make the story more vivid.
A film has also been made from this book and is available on the Netflix platform. I thought, for this review, since the film was also made, and in any case the book is small and smooth, to add some comparisons between book and film.
Let’s start talking about the plot. Tessa loves photography, it is her greatest passion, in fact she has a dark room in the house to which access is forbidden to everyone. Along with this passion for photography she also has a passion for cinema, and it is here that she will meet the boy she will end up falling in love with, Skylar.
The two will have another meeting after this first one, and it will be right after the second meeting that they will decide to go out together. They will spend a lot of the summer together, traveling in his Jeep, taking pictures with her camera and visiting places unknown to all, an old hotel, the lake. They will spend perfect days together until, after a fight, the tragedy arrives.
The same night that he is ready to leave for college and she runs to him to make up and confess her feelings, they have a bad accident and Skylar dies. This event will haunt Tessa, who, however, will continue to see and feel Sky’s presence in the most unexpected ways, will discover much of what is happening and will be able to have one last moment with the love of her life.
A heartbreaking love story because it is over even before starting, but a beautiful story to read because it is fresh and smooth. And what made me really happy was that the differences in the film are really minimal. Differences such as, the color of Sky’s Jeep, the ethnic origins of Tess’s best friend, and some of the final dynamics of the accident.
But considering the big part of the story, these in themselves are irrelevant details. In the book the chapters are divided into before and after the accident, in the film the division of events is exactly the same. A really interesting detail that I also noticed in the film is that, everything that happens chronologically before the accident is represented with more vivid colors, everything that happens after the accident instead is veiled by a gray, almost as if to reveal the state of the protagonist’s soul, a greyness in her soul for having lost the person she loved.
A symbolic detail this of the choice of colors that struck me a lot. I had no trouble noticing it and it made me smile because you can see that they really put a lot of effort into this film, and in the production, if I’m not mistaken, the author himself was also supervising.
In a nutshell The in between is a classic love story, without the they all lived happily ever after, with paranormal components added to perfection to the plot, characters that appear in the right places and settings that, when Sky and Tessa are together, make the reader dream too.
As for the literary genre instead, at the beginning of reading I thought it was a young adult, I later discovered it was a new adult, but in any case the characterizing scene is only one so you can very well read it even if you are only in the mood for YA.
