Lee Martin's "Break the Skin," the movie

Now showing at My Book, The Movie: Break the Skin by Lee Martin.

The entry begins:

It’s always fun to think about who might play whom in a movie version of one of my novels. I like to do what directors rarely do—disregard the age and look of an actor and consider instead how he or she, based on past performances, might connect with the inner lives I’ve created for my characters.

My new novel, Break the Skin, is on one level the story of a murder plot wrapped up in practical magic, but more than that it’s a story of love and how far people will go in order to feel that they matter to someone.

One of the narrators is a nineteen-year-old girl, Laney, who is boyish and sometimes timid and sometimes too forward for her own good, especially when it comes to her older friend, Delilah Dade. When the book opens, Delilah has lost her boyfriend to a woman named Rose MacAdow, and Laney, who dabbles in spells, invites Delilah to believe that Rose has placed a hex on them. The only way to stop the hex, Delilah says, is to kill Rose. Even though Delilah and Laney eventually decide the revenge plot will never work, they’ve set into motion a sequence of events that Laney, no matter how hard she tries, can’t stop. I see Laney as a combination of Hilary Swank and Ellen Page—the eagerness to please and the desire for acceptance that we see in the Hilary Swank of Boys Don’t Cry, and the sharp sweetness of Ellen Page in Juno.

Rose MacAdow is described as a big woman with a big heart, a loving woman who’s eager to protect what’s hers, a woman who believes she can control her future through spells cast for love. I had...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Lee Martin's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Break the Skin.

My Book, The Movie: Break the Skin.

--Marshal Zeringue