Calendar Girl

Rating:
Summary: Not as Good as the Movie
Review: I expected to like both the movie and the book. The movie was just okay, and the movie was better than the book. To give credit, the movie was faithful to the spirit of the book, if not the details.

Tricia Stewart, the author of Calendar Girl, and the driving force behind the calendar, would have benefited from someone else writing her story. She rambles on at times and describes everything as "brilliant." She comes across as sometimes overbearing and a bit of of a showoff, not unlike her character in the movie, Chris, played by Helen Mirren.

The story of a group of women in an English village who decide to raise money for the local hospital by posing for a nude, but tastefully so, calendar, is irresistible. But a story has to have conflict, so there are a few tossed in, and perhaps they really happened. Not everyone in the town thinks a nude calendar is a good idea, especially when it leads to an overdose of publicity. The families of the "models" feel neglected when the calendar becomes a hit and they spend all their time giving interviews and traveling. There are strained relationships within the group of women when some think that others (Tricia) are hogging the limelight.

But everything works out in the end, and they become temporarily famous, and make a ton of money for cancer research.

Rating:
Summary: One case where the movie tops the book
Review: I have to agree with some of the others, but I wanted to post anyway, because I wanted to drive it home that it's all really true, and not just people exaggerating or being mean-spirited. These women are great, but I think the only way most people will appreciate their story is by seeing the film. The book manages to make the whole episode mind-numbingly boring. We never get any vivid portrayals of any of the people involved except the author herself, plus she glosses over most of the really human, interesting moments of the scheme and concentrates instead on the drier details...even then, describing inconsistently, so some things are never explained at the beginning at the cost of clarity while something self-explanatory would be exhaustively dwelt upon. It did read like a journal entry (not even a diary, because that would be personal): "Heard back from the printers. Pleased with the final result..." (not a direct quote, but just to give an idea.) I can only think that the author was so worried about sentimentalizing everything that she went too far the other way. In being too careful she took the life out altogether. About the closest she gets to giving us a real view about the personal side of the story is when she describes some of the underhanded tactics the Brit tabloids used to talk to the org. members and her family...which I suppose shouldn't have shocked me, but it did anyway. I never give up a book mid-way, but I was only able to finish the second half by doing a lot of skimming. Buy the calendar, buy the movie, but *don't* buy this book, you'll only feel cheated.

Rating:
Summary: Transcribed, not written
Review: I wanted to like this book; I love what those women did. I had heard about calendar in 2000, and then while visiting England last autumn, I heard about the movie. While visiting England again at Christmas, I was given the book as a gift and was pleasantly surprised. However, because of a lack of narrative, the book is eventually unreadable; it reads like a word-for-word transcription of Ms. Stewart's diary. Some of the words are very funny -asides in conversation transcribed- but there aren't enough of them. And, without a thread of a story to lead the reader along, I lost interest; I hadn't made it halfway through before giving up and skipping to the epilogue.

Rating:
Summary: Calendar Girl
Review: If you enjoy listening to one side of a telephone conversation, or to someone who talks a mile a minute about people and places you don't know, you might enjoy this book.
Try to get beyond the British slang, and you will find a story about fairly shallow women who had one good idea.
This is almost all direct characterization; the author tells everything. The reader discovers little.

Rating:
Summary: No front bottoms
Review: In 2003, American audiences were treated to CALENDAR GIRLS, a little gem of a film starring Helen Mirren based on the experiences a group of women in their 40s, 50s and 60s in the north of England who posed starkers for a year 2000 calendar to raise money for leukemia research, and in memory of John Baker, the husband of one of the ladies and a locally well-regarded and much loved Assistant National Park Officer in the Yorkshire Dales, who'd died of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in July 1998. Of course, the nudity, both in the film and on the calendar, was tastefully presented, with the naughty bits obscured and most definitely "no front bottoms". The calendar's concept, and the driving force behind its creation, came from Tricia Stewart, a close friend of John and Angela Baker. In real life, Tricia ran a medical software company with her husband, Ian, and taught yoga and Pilates on the side. This book, CALENDAR GIRL, is Tricia's story of the 2-year flurry of frenetic activity that the calendar catalyzed, and the roughly 300,000 copies that were sold in Britain and the United States.

First of all, let me unequivocally state that the film adaptation was wonderful, and I deeply admire author Alicia Stewart for the originality of her idea and for the hard work and dedication she and her colleagues demonstrated in getting the calendar created and marketed. What started out almost as a lark burgeoned into a monster with a life of its own - as such things are wont to do - involving a grueling schedule of domestic and foreign media interviews, appearances on television talk shows and at book-signings both at home and in the U.S., product endorsements, the film, and considerable fame. And the Leukemia Research Fund in Britain and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America received a bunch of money. It also destroyed friendships, almost administered the coup-de-grace to a marriage, and, as a final insult, subjected Tricia and Ian to hateful articles in the gutter press. However, that tribute said ...

I realized what was wrong with CALENDAR GIRL about two-thirds into it. It has the flow of a diary, and I gather that Stewart used such as the primary source for her narrative. Trouble is, she failed to edit out so very much that was trivial and, frankly, numbingly boring. As a random example of the story's "feel" , which is typical of the book throughout:

"Lynda had had an invite from Preethi, the Indian girl we'd met at the bookfair, to go to her book launch at Dover Street, by the Ritz, on Thursday night. It was the same day as a shoot in London for the "Mail's You" magazine. Lynda had sent her a calendar, which was in her office. She was having a stressful day organizing her launch and when she went in her office, the calendar fell off the shelf. So she phoned Lynda who was also miserable and the depression lifted for both of them."

Then later, when they meet this Preethi for the launch dinner:

"Sunflowers mean happiness and are Preethi's mum's favourite flower. We met her mum and dad and lots of her friends and drank champagne. Her book focuses on following your dreams, following the African dancer. Later after speeches an African dancer appeared and a band, it was brilliant."

All of the above - and so much more in a similar vein -should've been left out, but perhaps wasn't because the resulting volume wouldn't have been much more than a pamphlet in length.

I really wanted to award at least three stars because Tricia's heart is in the right place, but just couldn't because I struggled to finish CALENDAR GIRL, and was so relieved when I arrived at the last period. I highly recommend the film, but not this well-intentioned but fatally flawed book.