Luckily for her, her would-be suitor dies in an accident, and Catherine ends up betrothed to his far more age-appropriate son instead. She runs away from home to seek sanctuary with her newly married uncle, but she ultimately accepts her fate, resolving to never lose her sense of self, even as she’s being married off. Then she spends her time evading suitors, before becoming engaged to a wealthy man who’s much older than her - old enough to have adult children.
The book starts off as merely an account of her days, until her father decides to marry her off. Catherine, Called Birdy is the Middle Ages diary of 14-year-old Catherine, the only daughter of an English lord. With Game of Thrones’ Bella Ramsey leading the cast, Catherine Called Birdy is the rare book-to-film adaptation that makes some huge changes for the better.Ĭushman’s 1994 novel is pretty bleak. Sometimes, books aren’t cinematic enough to play well on screen, and Dunham and her team understand that, so they updated Cushman’s story to make it more cohesive and compelling as a movie. It may be even odder to say that this time, the changed ending actually improves the plot. So to fans of Karen Cushman’s Newbery Honor-winning historical novel Catherine, Called Birdy, it may seem odd that writer-director Lena Dunham changed the book’s ending for the screen in favor of something more modern. Take the most recent adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which gives the novel an egregious modern update, turning Anne Elliot from a somber, sensible woman into a snippy, sarcastic one.
Still, some screen interpretations of a book seem to be universally despised for what they alter. What no one seems to agree on is whether it’s better for an adaptation to faithfully follow the book or chart its own course. It’s hard to find anything in pop culture that most people agree on, but at least there’s one broad statement about media that rarely starts arguments: It’s widely agreed that a book is usually better than a movie or show adapted from it, no matter how faithful or artistic the adaptation might be.
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