MEGHAN SCHILLING
campus editor
meghan.schilling@my.tccd.edu

Romantic movies always think they are doing something different because their stories include different people and issues. However, in the movie “The Sky Is Everywhere,” they take a different turn.

It focuses on a grieving character who can’t decide what she wants. People know the saying that books are always better than the movies. In this case, that is 100% true, which was very upsetting for me. Sadly, we aren’t here to review the book.

In the movie, we are following the grief-stricken sister Lennie who lost her sibling Bailey to a sudden heart condition.

Lennie can’t cope with the loss of her sister, so she is trying everything she can to follow in her footsteps.

We also learn how Lennie thinks she is the only one grieving her sister’s death. However, her uncle Big and her grandma are learning to move on and accept this fatal accident along with Bailey’s boyfriend, Toby. 

After school on Lennie’s first day back, she hears about this new boy named Joe Fontaine, who is from Paris. Lennie couldn’t help but find the boy mesmerizing. I mean, he plays guitar, which I guess the movie director thinks girls are crazy about.  

Lennie runs out of class after being challenged for the first chair in band and she forfeits her position. Fontaine begs her to play with him, but she refuses, causing her to break down in front of him. 

She gets home and finds Toby helping out her Grandma who begs Lennie to talk to him, which she obliges. They learn how much they have in common besides her sister. 

Eventually, this leads to Toby and Lennie kissing, which makes her feel like she betrayed her sister. Lennie then asks her sister for a sign of forgiveness, which brings Joe back into the picture as her saving grace. Or is it?

This movie missed multiple key elements from the book, which made the movie flop, in my opinion. They also made Lennie into a huge crybaby, which she isn’t in the book. 

Lennie had a better character arc in the book because it shows how a person would truly grieve after losing someone close to them.

The book also gave a better understanding of why she went after both Toby and Joe, unlike the movie did. The movie made her seem like she was boy crazy, which was far from the truth.

One thing that drove me really insane is we didn’t get to see much of Lennie’s grandma and her uncle. In the book, they gave her some wonderful life lessons and even brought some light to her story.

This movie just didn’t satisfy me as the book did. I will, however, compliment some components they brought from the book, even though it was only a few. 

If directors want to make movies based on books, they need to do a better job at portraying them because, unfortunately, for this story, it left out a huge key element.