LENS+6+Rodriguez

Back to Personal Page Eddie Rodriguez YA Lit Dr. Sherry The Orange Houses: Transmedial While reading //The Orange Houses,// by Paul Griffin about a 15 year-old girl named Tamika (Mik), 18 year-old Jimmi Sixies, and 16 year-old Fatima. All their lives are a mess and yet somehow they are swirled together to make a crazy and maturing life story. Mik is hearing impaired and lives with just her broking down mother and can sometimes even shut out the world by turning off her aid. Meanwhile, Jimmi is a war vet that is proclaimed crazy and a druggie by the community after he came back from war by doctors, only to find that his fiancé lost is baby and committed suicide. Fatima is a foreign refugee that is trying her best to stay under the radar long enough to become legal and get her family to the US. So even though they are from far different backgrounds and situations, none have it easy and all come together throughout the book. I decided to look at how this book could be changed into a movie/play or even could be acted out in a high school class. To look at this from a movie point, one could easily see the benefits of making this a film. The characters do not all know each other or know their importance to one another till later in the book but the movie could show students that they do interact without doing much. Using a film version of this could really help students get really into Mik’s mind because she doesn’t really talk much due to her disability. We have all seen movies where there is a narrated voice for their thoughts and I feel that something like that would make the role more influence to the student audience. Also I felt like sometime the book was too choppy, or jumped around too much. I understand the point of it doing that but I feel as if a movie or play would be able to show that transition far better than what a book can do. To add onto that, sometimes in the book I was confused of where the characters were at even though the chapters tell us every time. Some of the dialogue in the book during scenes where there was extensive conversations were also a bit confusing and a film would get rid of that problem and allow student to focus on what is being said. I feel as if seeing a movie or play of it would work much better for understanding purposes. So there are a lot of positives to using a film or play version of this text once your class has read the book. I also feel as if there have already been plenty of movies that have been successes because of how they have characters cross paths throughout the story. It is just an extra entertainment factor to actually watch characters grow into the story or even on to each other. I liked how the book had each character describe each other without using names to show that they were just acquaintances or just strangers but I feel like seeing them in a film or play would still be more affective. I see a lot of good things about watching a version of this after reading it but not too many negatives. In the classroom, I could possibly have my students act this book out. Everyone always gets to act out //Romeo and Juliet//, but we need to escape that traditional state of mind and jump into the future. I know for a fact that I would have loved to act out a book like this in high school. It would have gotten me far more engaged and trying to understand all the characters’ thought processes. The major concern I would have with having students act out some of these scenes would be that they might not be able to handle the material seriously and safely. I’m not sure if my high school would even approve this book to our curriculum because of some of the sexual references or drug situations. Having a room full of teens trying to do this seriously may be too much. But it could really also be a test to see if students want to explore more types of works like this. If they handle something like this well, then I would be happy to expand the taught curriculum to more mature or explicit but appropriate content. It is not a hard story to read but having students’ role play this book definitely has its positives and negatives. Yet it would be worth a try. Doing anything to get students more involved in literature is worth a try. Overall I feel like this would go well with transmediation. I don’t see much of the message or feelings from the book being ruined or altered if the text was brought to life. And I do feel like it is young adult literature but it could be difficult to have a high school accept a book like this. Maybe one day I will propose it and get the chance to teach it in my class.