The long-running Italian cartoon about a group of best-friend fairies, Winx Club, is one of the few explicitly girl-focused shows to make the transition to a darker, edgier live-action. Fate: The Winx Saga by Netflix casts the same spell on the bright, visually vibrant cartoon that Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Riverdale did on their family-friendly Archie Comics counterparts. It has a surprisingly nuanced plot that delves into the consequences of war across generations — but it comes at a cost, both for the characters and for that familiar sense of friendship and mutual support. In the first episode, we see Bloom (Abigail Cowen) moving into Alfea, a boarding school for fairies and specialists (male fairies) in the Otherworld. The first person she speaks with is a specialist named Sky (Danny Griffin), who discovers that Bloom is from the "realm" of California and that she had no idea she was a fairy three months ago. She meets her roommates, including Stella (Hannah...
Jennifer Niven's All the Bright Places: A Heartbreaking and beautiful novel about grief and redemption.
All the bright places are one of my top favorite books is Jennifer Niven’s first Young Adult novel that explores mental illness, love, and grief. Theodore Finch or ‘freak’ (as he is commonly called) is an awkward young man who -in his spare time, only thinks about ways to end himself. When Violet Markey, a grieving student, emerges at the school bell tower one day, it's unclear who saves whose life. Violet and Finch's lives will be irrevocably changed by this one encounter which will take them on an extraordinary, yet the heartbreaking journey of love, life, and self-discovery. To be honest, before I had even sat down to read a copy of “ All the Bright Places” , its sad element drew me in and I felt compelled to read. I was surprised to find myself turning page after page till I reached the end of this book. All the Bright Places , very beautifully, yet bluntly highlights the plight of bipolar patients. Unlike several other novels in the genre, it does not attempt to d...