Usually when we hear about young adult novels being adapted into films, they're all generic efforts in some kind of genre we've already seen a hundred times onscreen-- stories about children learning about special powers they never knew they had, girls in love with some kind of mythical creature, you know the drill. But today's young adult novel in question, the series of interconnected short stories in the book Let It Snow actually came pre-recommended by two of my friends, one of whom is a young adult librarian and actually knows her stuff. So even though at Deadline is describing it as a potential "teen Love Actually," I'm going with Rebecca's enthusiasm and assuming it could be better than that sounds.
The one thing working against it, though, is that Gossip Girl creator Josh Schwartz will be behind it, having bought the rights to the book along with his Fake Empire producing partner Stephanie Savage. They've set Jordan Roter to write the script, one of several jobs she's gotten after adapting her novel Camp Rules into a film at Paramount. Let It Snow, as you might guess, is a Christmas-set story, a collaboration between the young adult authors John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle. The three separate stories, which seem to involve romance and alienation and the usual teen themes, all intersect at a Waffle House, which automatically has me on board having been a bored teenager growing up in a Southern town where Waffle House was the only place you could go at night. Like I said, there seems good reason to have more faith in this than you might normally. There's always a chance they'll totally screw up the adaptation, but it's a teen-aimed movie that's not about vampires or even rich people in a big city, and let's just be grateful for that in the meantime.
