Christina Lynch's "Sally Brady's Italian Adventure," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure by Christina Lynch.

The entry begins:

Castles! Villas! Luxury Hotels! But also air raid shelters, prison cells, and POW camps. And hats! Lots of hats! These are the first things that come to mind when I think of Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure: The Movie.

I love books and movies with a fast pace, gorgeous settings, a mix of dark comedy, romance, drama, reframed history, and characters forced into excruciating choices--so of course I made those the central ingredients of Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure. And I have a background in TV writing, so the novel is intentionally very cinematic. It moves from humor to drama and back again as Sally, an intrepid and irreverent young American orphan-turned-gossip columnist, gets stuck behind enemy lines when Italy slides into World War II. I was thinking of 1930s screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey when I wrote it, but also of course Casablanca. I was fascinated by the idea of how life in all its complexity carries on in wartime—not to mention the echoes for our own era. No one tone was enough to tell Sally’s story—and in fact the real life WWII diaries of women like Iris Origo and Hermione Ranfurly weren’t soppy or tearstained; they were resourceful, funny, pragmatic, and able to manipulate the male ego as needed. Enter Sally, stage left…

Coming of age stories are demanding, but Jenna Ortega (Wednesday) has the smarts and range for Sally, and Elle Fanning (The Great) would be Sally’s pal Lila. Sally is a tricky role...[read on]

Visit Christina Lynch's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Italian Party.

The Page 69 Test: The Italian Party.

Writers Read: Christina Lynch (April 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Sally Brady's Italian Adventure.

--Marshal Zeringue