Love conquers our differences

The Shape of Water

IT is not often you read a book that is an adaptation of a movie; usually it is the other way around, and generally the adaptations aren’t very good.

The Shape of Water by Guillermo del Toro (who also directed the Academy Award-winning film) and Daniel Kraus is the opposite - it’s well worth a read.

The story is set at a scientific base in Baltimore, about a mute girl called Elisa who falls in love with a god-like fish-man and must ultimately choose to save him against great odds.

The plot may sound absurd, but, just like the film, it is ultimately a moving story about difference and acceptance.

At times the book felt a bit cumbersome, but the emotional payoff by the end of the novel was well worth it.

What the novel does extremely well is paint a picture of 1960s America and shows the reader that era we often feel nostalgic wasn’t all music and innocence.

From the treatment of people with disabilities, women in the workplace, the LGBT community, civil rights, tensions from the Cold War, the book explores it all.

Exploring all those issues may sound like a lot for a small 300-page book, but it does it in a way where everything is given the right amount of time and shows how the world was a lot more unfair back then than it is today.

The novel adaptation of the film offers the ability to explore these issues more in depth than the film and provides you the opportunity to get to know and understand the characters and their motivations better.

The Shape of Water is a moving novel that explores how love can conquer even the differences between us.