CRAZY RICH ASIANS, The Movie
The satiric debut novel Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan (RH/Doubleday), published in June, has been acquired for the big screen by the production company behind The Hunger Games.
The book has been particularly successful on the West Coast. It has been on the lower rungs of the L.A. Times best seller for three weeks and was featured in the newspaper’s “Summer Reading Guide.”
In a statement, producer Nina Jacobson said, “Crazy Rich Asians is that immersive page turner I am constantly searching for but so rarely find. Kevin’s writing took me into a world I’d never seen or imagined and got me so invested in the romance at the heart of it that I could not put the book down until I saw whether or not they made it. This novel represents an enormous opportunity … to tell a universal story to a global audience.” The latter probably refers to the lucrative Chinese market (which, notes the South China Morning Post in reporting the story, is now the second-largest after the U.S.).
The book has very little in common with The Hunger Games. New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin called it a “a dizzily shopaholic comedy of crass manners,” that “offers refreshing nouveau voyeurism to readers who long ago burned out on American and English aspirational fantasies.”
Check your holds; they are heavy in some libraries.