Review: Cut the strings and walk free, Woody.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 2, 2014
Loved this adaptation! Coming from a military family, I know exactly how hard it is to see veterans suffering without the benefits they deserve, in pain few people outside the service can understand, missing out on resources that many of us take for granted because they're too broken to fight for them when they get denied on the first try. It's all a bureaucratic nightmare for those who come home less whole than when they left.Levi "Woody" Woodyer opens this tale as a former Marine whose pain takes up all his life. His father bribes him with a chance to take out his prized car in order to get him to seek medical help from a non-VA hospital; Woody takes him up on it just for the sake of getting to enjoy a small part of one day by driving that car. His thoughts turn back to when he was younger, whole, and he'd taken that car out with Linnea Fey -a blonde bombshell who'd been his high school sweetheart- which distracts him enough to make it to the hospital.Linn is there as a physical therapist only time has changed her, too. She's no longer a willowy blonde, but instead a blue-haired, confident woman who wants to help him heal from his pain. It seems as if she's offering him some kind of fairy magic since his pain is so all-consuming as is his guilt over the things that took place while he was in the service.I loved watching him struggle to accept the possibility of hope. I loved seeing him fight to survive the pain. I reveled in his chance to rediscover a reason to live, to find passion again, to feel something other than guilt and shame and misery.This was a wonderful tale of survival and healing. It brought me a lot of joy in the short time it took me to read it and I'd put it in my top 10 list of fairy tale adaptations. Thanks for another five-star-read, Selena! I loved this one!