Lauren Stienstra's "The Beauty of the End," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Beauty of the End: A Novel by Lauren Stienstra.

The entry begins:

Though it’s set against the backdrop of a species-ending catastrophe, at its core, The Beauty of the End is about the tension and contradiction between opposites: life and death, right and wrong, betrayal and justice, personal choice and collective duty—one cannot exist without the other.

The theme duality is also set up in the dynamic of the main characters, a set of genetically-identical-but-entirely-different twin sisters: Charlie and Maggie. Off the page, Charlie and Maggie are born to a Marshallese family and later adopted out to an unsuspecting white family in Pennsylvania via fraudulent proceedings. (This is based on a real life tragedy.) For the role, it would be important to me to cast someone with Pacific Island heritage, and Keisha Castle-Hughes quickly comes to mind. Not only does she have Māori heritage, she also has experience playing a twin—a major feature of her Oscar-winning film Whale Rider.

There is of course a bit of a love triangle in the story, with a male character named Nolan. One of Nolan’s most salient features is...[read on]

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My Book, The Movie: The Beauty of the End.

--Marshal Zeringue