Precious Book Vs Movie Analysis

Many famous novels are adapted into films using a multitude of different strategies to make it interesting for all audiences. Push, the debut novel by Sapphire written in 1996, is told from the point of view of an illiterate 16-year-old obese black girl named Claireece “Precious” Jones who lives in Harlem. Precious, her preferred name, is raped by her parents at a very young age and had an incest child with down syndrome at the age of twelve and another child at the age of sixteen. After thirteen years, a movie adaptation based on this novel was released. Contrary to the book, the movie is named Precious and is directed by Lee Daniels. The novel and the film are completely different for many reasons. Keeping in mind that the movie Precious

The younger vesion of herself describes what is happening in a disturbing way when she says, “That smell, he put his ball in my face, years like wash machine aroun and around, mama jaw open like evil wolf, the smell deeper than toilet, her fingers pick apart my pussy.” (Sapphire, 72) Clearly, while reading this, it is difficult not to imagine how sick both her parents must be to do these kinds of things to their little girl. The novel focuses on Claireece’s life as a rape victim whereas the movie focuses more on the hope that she will be rescued from her situation. The hope that she dreams of is to become independent if she does well in school and also the hope that she will finally be able to live life without her abusive mother. In the movie, Precious doesn’t have long flashbacks about her father raping her. She instead talks to a welfare worker about what happens in her everyday life and explains that her mother likes to use the system to her advantage and takes all the money meant for her own children. While Claireece is talking

In the novel, Claireece is a teenager who has no idea how absolutely wrong her parents are and that there are ways she can get help. However, all she wishes for is for her mother to start being a better parent and for herself to forget about everything that happened in her life. In the movie, Claireece is portrayed as a violent teen who wants revenge for what her parents have done to her. At one point in the novel, Claireece is telling a story about how, when her father raped her, she liked it and never asked him to stop because it felt good. She didn’t know that it was wrong at the time and was an innocent little girl. This is proven when Claireece says, “Daddy sick me, disgust me, but still he sex me up. I nawshus in my stomach but hot tight in my twat and I think I want it back, the smell of the bedroom, the hurt - he slap my face till it sting and my ears sing separate songs from each other, call me names, pump my pussy in out in out in out awww I come.” (Sapphire, 60) She clearly doesn’t know that it is completely unacceptable for a father to rape his child but she also doesn’t do anything to stop it from happening. Claireece has so many mixed emotions that makes it difficult to understand exactly what is happening. In the novel, Claireece is also not a violent person and doesn’t want to cause any trouble to her mom or her dad in any way. In the movie,